Rebeka Verbeke

Company Overview

Rebeka Verbeke

By 1996, they had built a search engine (initially called BackRub) that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages.

Google facts

Founded

1998

Founders

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Incorporation

4 September 1998

Initial public offering

19 August 2004

Headquarters

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View

CA 94043, USA

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in 1995.

Company Overview

Rebeka Verbeke

Google facts

Founded

1998

Founders

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Incorporation

4 September 1998

Initial public offering

19 August 2004

Headquarters

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View

CA 94043, USA

Larry and Sergey named the search engine that they built “Google”, a play on the word “googol”, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google Inc. was born in 1998, when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a cheque for $100,000 to that entity – which until then didn’t exist.

Company Overview

Rebeka Verbeke

Google facts

Founded

1998

Founders

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Incorporation

4 September 1998

Initial public offering

19 August 2004

Headquarters

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View

CA 94043, USA

The first “Google doodle” in 1998 was intended to let visitors to the homepage know that Google’s minders were offline at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. There’s now a team of “doodlers” and we’ve posted more than 1,000 different doodles on homepages worldwide.

Company Overview

Rebeka Verbeke

Google facts

Founded

1998

Founders

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Incorporation

4 September 1998

Initial public offering

19 August 2004

Headquarters

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View

CA 94043, USA

Company Overview

Rebeka Verbeke

Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."

The words: "Don't be evil" form part of the sixth point in these Core Values, and in full states: "Do the right thing: don't be evil. Honesty and Integrity in all we do. Our business practices are beyond reproach. We make money by doing good things.

Company overview

Rebeka Verbeke

In 2000, we introduced AdWords, a self-service programme for creating online ad campaigns. Today our advertising solutions, which include display, mobile and video ads as well as the simple text ads that we introduced more than a decade ago, help thousands of businesses to grow and be successful.

On April Fools’ Day in 2004, we launched Gmail. Our approach to email included features like speedy search, huge amounts of storage and threaded messages.

Company overview

Rebeka Verbeke

Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock took place on Wall Street on 18 August 2004.

We acquired digital mapping company Keyhole in 2004 and launched Google Maps and Google Earth in 2005. Today Maps also features live traffic, travel directions and street-level imagery, and Earth lets you explore the ocean and the moon.

Company overview

Rebeka Verbeke

In 2006, we acquired online video sharing site YouTube. Today 60 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. Cat videos, citizen journalism, political candidacy and double rainbows have never been the same.

Amidst rumours of a “Gphone”, we announced Android – an open platform for mobile devices – and the Open Handset Alliance, in 2007.

Company overview

Rebeka Verbeke

In June 2011, we introduced the Google+ project, aimed at bringing the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web and making all of Google better by including people, their relationships and their interests.

Company overview

Rebeka Verbeke

Our culture

Rebeka Verbeke

It’s really the people that make Google the kind of company it is. We hire people who are smart and determined, and we favour ability over experience. Although Googlers share common goals and visions for the company, we hail from all walks of life and speak dozens of languages, reflecting the global audience that we serve. And when not at work, Googlers pursue interests ranging from cycling to beekeeping, from frisbee to foxtrot.We strive to maintain the open culture often associated with start-ups, in which everyone is a hands-on contributor and feels comfortable sharing ideas and opinions. In our weekly all-hands (“TGIF”) meetings – not to mention over email or in the cafe – Googlers ask questions directly to Larry, Sergey and other execs about any number of company issues. Our offices and cafes are designed to encourage interactions between Googlers within and across teams, and to spark conversation about work as well as play.

Our culture

Rebeka Verbeke

Our culture

Rebeka Verbeke

Management team

Rebeka Verbeke

Larry Page CEO and Co-Founder

Eric E. Schmidt Executive Chairman

What we believe

Rebeka Verbeke

Ten things that we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things”. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Our homepage interface is clear and simple without ads and distracting, and pages load instantly to serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.

What we believe

Rebeka Verbeke

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well and how we could do it better. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.We know that your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web, you want it right away – and we aim to please. Our goal is to get people to leave our homepage as quickly as possible.

What we believe

Rebeka Verbeke

4. Democracy on the web works.Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services.

What we believe

Rebeka Verbeke

6. You can make money without doing evil.Google is a business. The revenue that we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our .

7. There’s always more information out there.Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible.

What we believe

Rebeka Verbeke

8. The need for information crosses all borders.Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible by using our translation tools.

9. You can be serious without a suit.Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging and that the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture (best company to work for, in last couple of years).

10. Great just isn’t good enough.Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways.

Rebeka Verbeke

Rebeka Verbeke