The story of Google

Backrub is the search engine, created as a matter of fun, by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for their Ph. D. research. At the beginning, after completing the creation of this search engine, they decided to sell this searching technique to some big company like Yahoo. As there was no one available to buy this, a company with the name Google was started in 1998.

In November 1998 only, the Google web site started showing its face as a first time. At the beginning, it was not possible for them to earn any significant amount of money. Sun and IBM gave a few Sun Ultra II, F50 IBM RS/6000 Servers as free donations. In 2001, Yahoo was bargaining with Google to buy it. Yahoo, without knowing the strength of a search engine, withdrew from this bargain as it thought that $5 Billion is too much money to buy a search engine. (What would have been the fate of Google if it were sold to Yahoo?...It is beyond imagination.)

When Google shares were released in 2004, all wondered how a web site with an empty home page having no advertisement in it was going to make money. In the first half of that year alone, Google earned $1.4 billion. Today, it is a $6.1 billion company.

Data center of this company has 450,000 servers.

Many kinds of servers are there from 533 MHz Intel Celeron to dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III.

Locations: Mountain View, California, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, Dublin and Ireland. Finally, in 2006, a very big and very new one was established at The Dallas, Oregon.

In 2005 alone, Google has tabulated 8 billion pages.

They run all their programs in thousands of x86 servers, in their own Linux and in their own web server. The name of their web server is GWS/2.1. That is, Google Web Server, current Version 2.1. That is, Apache’s Google version.

And, here is some interesting information.

It is said that 20 megawatt electricity is needed for running all 450,000 servers. That is, Google’s monthly electricity bill is $2 million. Amazing!!!

You can see Google’s very first Production Server in the picture presented below. Now it is in the museum.