At that time, the web contained about 10 million documents with countless links between them. The computing resources of such a project were estimated far beyond student theses, and the dimensions and complexity of the project attracted the attention of Sergey Brin, who had worked on data mining articles and algorithm analysis during his PhD.

Sergey Brin joined the BackRub project and took over the mathematical side of the research, while Larry Page worked on link weighting and backlinks.

The weight of the links, in simple words, indicated that each link is from which source and with what degree of importance it targets another website. For example, the importance of the link that Intel’s website gave to IBM’s website was very different from the link that a teenager’s diary-blog gave to IBM’s website.

At this point, Sergey Brin and Larry Page realized that they had taken a big step: the backrub engine not only performed well but also scaled as the Internet expanded. In other words, since the algorithm worked by analyzing links, the bigger the web, the more powerful the search engine.

For this reason, Page and Brin chose the name Googol (meaning the number one and 100 zeros in front of it) for their search engine, which was a symbol of processing the endless amount of information on the web. They published the first version of Google in August 1996 on the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu, a year after they first met and got to know each other.

Page and Brin registered the google.com domain in September 1997. They knew that they could no longer rely on university resources to continue. In August 1998, one of the university advisors suggested that they meet Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun Microsystems. The meeting was held on the porch of this consultant’s house with a demonstration of the Google search engine.

Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to Google Inc. But the problem was that there was no company called Google yet. Page and Breen kept the check in their dorm room for several weeks while they went through the business registration process and opened new bank accounts for their business.

Google was officially registered on September 4, 1998, and according to the previous agreement, Larry Page became the CEO and Sergey Brin became the company’s president. The two defined the company’s mission in one phrase: “Organizing the world’s information and making it accessible and useful to all people.”

While Google’s daily searches were growing exponentially, the development of the company’s infrastructure required more capital.

At the end of the first year of its establishment, it held its first fundraising round and received a total of one million dollars from three angel investors, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, and Ram Shriram, one of the entrepreneurs of the technology world.

But the potential and early success of Google in the second round of fundraising attracted the attention of two famous venture capitalists: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, after carefully examining Google, they decided to invest a total of $50 million in this fledgling startup. .

The interesting point is that before these investments, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had offered Excite to buy their startup for one million dollars, but Excite refused to pay more than 750,000 for Google, and thus the contract was canceled.

After raising capital, Google moved to its second office in Palo Alto, home to many famous Silicon Valley startups. In 2000, the Google team launched Google AdWords with the idea of ​​Susan Wojitsky, which optimally changed the company’s revenue stream.

The AdWords service allowed companies to show their ads precisely to those who were looking for related products or services. This service was a revolutionary example in the world of online advertising and allowed Google to have a powerful money-making machine in addition to the search engine.

While the number of Google searches increased daily, with these changes, Google employees found a better mood and focused strongly on the path of progress.

At this time, John Doerr and Michael Koritz, the main investors of the company, according to their long-term experiences in the technology world, suggested to the founders of Google to hire a more experienced manager to lead their startup. Sergey Brin and Larry Page conducted complex interview sessions with several candidates but found none of them aligned with Google’s vision and long-term horizon.

In 2001, Eric Schmidt went to the interview meeting of the founders of Google with his hands full: he had detailed plans for developing Google internationally, diversifying products, sales, and accounting strategies, and managed to get on the Google board. A few months later, Page and Brin tapped him to become Google’s CEO, seeing Schmidt as the best fit for the company’s IPO event.

Eric Schmidt was appointed CEO of Google in August 2001 and remained in this position for 10 years. The joint idea of ​​Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt was to create a comprehensive ecosystem that would meet all the digital needs of users through Google.

In the product development department, Schmidt had Merissa Meyer by his side, who had previously managed web products with user interface changes and the introduction of Google Doodles. One of the first developments of Google in the search engine side was the addition of the image search section.

Google executives wanted this company to be a symbol of the endless power of innovation; For this reason, they adopted a policy that allowed Google employees to dedicate 20% of their working time to projects that interest them, even if it is outside the scope of their official duties. This policy led to the emergence of some of Google’s most popular products in the following years.

In 2003, the Google News division was launched, and the board of directors purchased a building complex in Mountain View, California, to provide a suitable space for the company’s operations until they employed a thousand employees.

This office, known today as “Google Plex”, expanded over time by purchasing the surrounding buildings and became the largest company camp in the world.

Finally, on August 19, 2004, Google’s IPO event took place at a price of $85 per share, bringing a fortune of about $1.7 billion to the company’s founders and early investors. In addition, the value of the company was estimated at 27 billion dollars.

The introduction of the Google Maps service in 2005 marked another success in Google’s career and became a background for the company’s research collaboration with NASA. Google Maps evolved over time and became one of the most valuable features of Google to facilitate people’s daily lives.

In May 2011, Google reached a record of one billion unique visitors. In the same year, “Chrome OS” was also introduced, which was mainly used in Chromebook laptops. These laptops were manufactured by Acer and Samsung and were first released to the general public in some retail stores, but in later years were made available to students and teachers in schools for educational purposes.

This period coincided with the introduction of one of Google’s famous and failed projects, namely Google Plus. The fact was that Google managers wanted to compete with Facebook by launching a social network, and in this regard, they replaced Google Plus with the Google Buzz microblogging service. Despite repeated redesigns, Google Plus never achieved success.

In 2015, together with the founding of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, the company’s senior vice president under Eric Schmidt, replaced Larry Page as Google’s new CEO. Pichai, who joined Google in 2004, had proven his ability in leading the Google search bar, Google Gears, Google Pack, and Google Drive projects.

Pichai soon became one of the well-known faces of Google due to the idea of ​​the Chrome browser and the management of the team that was responsible for the development of this software, and he became the deputy CEO of the company. He also played a significant role in the development of Android and the development of Google Apps.

One of the most important products that was introduced in the early days of Pichai’s CEO was Google Assistant. Google Assistant was introduced two years later than Amazon’s Alexa and 5 years after Apple’s Siri, But very soon it found its right place among users.

In the early 2010s, Google executives decided that they needed to enter the mobile market to improve the Android user experience and ensure timely updates for users.

At that time, Android was available as an open-source operating system to different manufacturers, and each company released its own version with desired changes and different user interfaces. But by producing Nexus phones, Google intended to provide users with a pure and integrated Android experience.

The first Nexus phone, named Nexus One, was introduced in January 2010 in collaboration with HTC. After that, Google introduced new Nexus models every year in partnership with one of the smartphone manufacturing companies:

• Nexus S: Samsung manufacturer, Android 2.1 Eclair operating system can be updated to Android 2.2 Froyo and Android 2.3 Gingerbread
• Galaxy Nexus: manufactured by Samsung, the operating system Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich can be updated to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
• Nexus 4: manufactured by LG, the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system can be updated to Android 5.1
• Nexus 5: manufactured by LG, the Android 4.4 KitKat operating system can be updated to Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow
• Nexus 6: Motorola manufacturing company, Android 5 operating system before update to Android 7.1.1 Nougat
• Nexus 5X: manufactured by LG, operating system Android 6.0 Marshmallow updatable to Android 8.1.0 Oreo
• Nexus 6P: Huawei manufacturer, Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system

The production of Nexus phones continued until 2015, but Google gradually realized that this series of phones, despite the loyal fans, could not compete well with other flagships in the market.

The production of the first series of Pixel phones began in 2016, and Google played the main role in the design and development of this series. The company optimized pure Android for Pixel phones to provide a smoother experience to the audience.

Since Google’s main goal was to compete with the flagships of Google and Samsung, it used better hardware and especially improved cameras in these products, which consequently raised their prices higher than the Nexus series. Also, the peak of Android integration with Google platforms was also seen in these phones.

However, since 2019, Google has tried to gain popularity among mid-range phone users by adding the Pixel series to its product series. Also, in 2023, the first Pixel Fold was introduced to compete with foldable phones of competing brands.

Google was aware of the power of algorithms and machine learning from the beginning of its activities, and one of the most important areas in which it continuously invested was artificial intelligence.

As we said, in 2014, Google bought DeepMind Lab, which had advanced research in the field of artificial intelligence. Among the achievements of this laboratory, we can mention Alphago and AlphaFold projects.

Researchers at the AlphaGo project developed neural network models specifically for video games and game boards, and in 2016 AlphaGo beat the world champion Go player in a competition. Alphafold also made a significant contribution to the pharmaceutical industry by accurately predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins using a deep learning system.

On the other hand, Google had opened a special account on the development of neural processing units. TPUs, or tensor processing units, were custom-designed silicon chips developed specifically for machine learning and optimized for TensorFlow. According to Google, TPUs train and run AI models much faster than traditional chips.

In 2019, Google used Bert algorithms in its search engine, which understood the meaning of words in the text instead of understanding words separately. According to Google, Bert greatly improved the responsiveness of the search engine, because users could ask Google their questions naturally instead of listing their desired keywords.

In 2023, Google finally made Bard’s generative artificial intelligence system available to users, which was based on the large conversational language model LaMDA. Google Bard was integrated into many everyday Google services such as Drive, Maps, Docs, Gmail, and YouTube.

With the increasing popularity of ChatGPT, in May 2023, Google introduced the next generation of its artificial intelligence language model called PaLM 2, which had more capabilities in the field of understanding different languages ​​and the power of reasoning and coding. Google Jumnai based on this model was developed and replaced Bard.

Google’s noticeable speed and effort in the field of productive artificial intelligence can be considered one of the most obvious competitive manifestations of this company to obtain a greater share of various technology markets. After Microsoft’s huge investment in the startup OpenAI, Google also invested 500 million dollars in the startup Entropic.

The challenges of Google Jamnai photo production caused Sundar Pichai to invite Sergey Brin and Larry Page to have a closer relationship with this company by declaring an emergency (code red). Following this event, Sergey Brin officially confirmed his return to Google.

Also, in 2024, Google showed its readiness to compete with Apple by completely redesigning Android and took great steps towards local processing of artificial intelligence features in phones, such as Circle to Search.

This investigation became one of the longest and most complex antitrust cases in the history of technology, and finally, in 2017, the European Union sentenced Google to pay a heavy fine of 2.4 billion euros for prioritizing its shopping services (Google Shopping). .

A year later, the European Union condemned Google to pay a fine of 4.34 billion euros; But this time because of the Android operating system. Now Google was accused of encouraging mobile phone manufacturers to install their own apps (such as Google Maps, Gmail, and Play Store) and thus keeping competitors out of the market.

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In this case, Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle were influential in the final verdict and condemnation of Google by participating in the research group called FairSearch. In 2019, Google was fined another 1.5 billion euros by the European Commission. Google Adsense service was the main focus of these accusations.

After this case, it was the turn of the US Department of Justice to file a new and detailed complaint regarding Google’s monopolistic actions in the search engine and advertising market. In this lawsuit, more than 30 US states were on the opposite side of Google and sided with the judiciary.

In response to the accusations of the United States Department of Justice, Google announced that the online search and advertising market is a competitive market and different companies operate in this market. According to Google, users choose the company’s products and services because of their high quality, and this does not indicate exclusivity.

But in August 2024, Google finally lost its biggest antitrust case and was convicted by a Colombian court that it illegally monopolized the search market.

The Department of Justice and US prosecutors say that Google pays billions of dollars annually to mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung to install the company’s search engine as the default application on their products in order to maintain its 95% share of mobile searches.

The consequences of this ruling can be very heavy for Google, while Google still has several other antitrust cases pending.