More info
- Founded
- Founders
- Larry Page, Sergey Brin
- Headquarters
- Mountain View, California
- Type
- Technology corporation
- Website
- google.com
Won the search market by ranking pages according to who links to them — and built an advertising machine on top.
PageRank treated a link as a vote and weighted that vote by the standing of the linking page. It was considerably harder to manipulate than the keyword counting of the time. The name is a misspelling of googol, the number 10¹⁰⁰.
Revenue comes almost entirely from advertising, which has shaped everything else the company does. Along the way its infrastructure work spread well beyond the building: the MapReduce, Bigtable, GFS and Borg papers gave rise to Hadoop and Kubernetes respectively. Alphabet was formed in 2015 as the parent company.