“Google. Behind the silly sounding name is a sophisticated
search engine, a new kid on the block that is attracting millions
of hits a day and has won several industry awards for its simple,
clean interface and fast, accurate results. The 26-year-old
co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started the company last
year following three years of related Ph.D. research at Stanford
University. Among its early investors was Andy Bechtolsheim,
co-founder of Sun Microsystems and current Vice President at Cisco
Systems. Google recently completed $25 million in equity funding,
led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Stanford is also an investor.”
“Unlike conventional search engines, Google is
hypertext-based. It analyzes all the content on each Web page and
factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise positions of all
terms on the page. Google also factors in the content of
neighboring web pages. Google claims its patent-pending PageRank
technology performs an objective measurement of the importance of
web pages that is calculated by solving an equation of 500 million
variables and more than 2 billion terms. In other words, this is
rocket science.”