Google or Get Lost!
They are part of the “$1 salary” club but rank amongst the
richest persons in the world.
They run their company as a triumvirate, possibly the only corporation in
the world to be run like this.
Their impact on the world has been profound and if one tried to live without
them in today’s world, it would be extremely difficult. To ones
astonishment, it might even prove to be impossible!
“They” are the “Google Guys” – Eric, Larry and Sergey (in alphabetical
order).
Fittingly, in the year 2007, PC World ranked all three of them in the
numero uno slot of “The 50 Most Important People on the Web”,
a position that they may not only have retained but consolidated upon.
In the introduction section of his book “The Google Story”, David A. Vise
writes “Not since Gutenberg invented the modern printing press more than 500
years ago, making books and scientific tomes affordable and widely available
to the masses, has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed
access to information, as profoundly as Google.”
Whilst one cannot today visualize a life without Google, there was indeed
such a period in the early years of the Internet when Yahoo! dominated
search.
Getting listed on Yahoo! in those days was a painful task. One had to study
Yahoo’s instructions in great detail. One had to drill down, section by
section, to the directory structure that best described one’s site. And
then, after one had submitted the data, one was blandly informed that Yahoo!
had humans physically reviewing the site and they were (apparently or quite
possible, deliberately) overloaded and hence it would take six months plus
to get listed. But, Yahoo hastened to add, there was an easy way out. One
could pay a paltry $300 or so and get an immediate listing. This was the
business model that made Yahoo! Promoters David Filo and Jerry Yang
billionaires.
However, if David and Jerry had a crystal ball or a mirror on the wall that
would tell them their future, they would possibly have shuddered with fear
to know that just down the road, in the same hallowed campus that they
studied (Stanford University), a monster was in the process of birthing. It
would eat into their market share and make them marginal players in Internet
search. It would also force Jerry Yang one day to step down as CEO of Yahoo!
David and Jerry had no such crystal ball and so they enjoyed their then
exalted status as giants amongst the competition. They didn’t know it but
their stay at the top would be very short lived.
The other search engines of those times (in alphabetical order, Altavista,
Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos etc.) were ineffective and each search
engine threw up its own confusing search result. This resulted in the
strange concept of “a search engine that searched search engines” to focus
output and websites such as DogPile and AskJeeves were born.
Incidentally, not many people today know that the world’s very first search
engine was Archie (which its founders painstakingly pointed out "derives
from the word "archive" without the v." and has no connection to Archie
Bunker.) (Archie was, i.m.h.o., totally ineffective and it is probably
remembered in the history books because of its interesting name.)
In this non-serious and playful world of Internet search, a search engine
called Jughead soon followed. Then along came Veronica.
Jughead stood for (believe it or not) Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy
Excavation And Display. Veronica stood for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented
Net-wide Index to Computer Archives.
Into this comic character, gopher and rodent infested search atmosphere
entered the Google Guys.
It seems unbelievable that it was as recently as 1995 that Sergey met Larry
at Stanford University! This was just a year after David Filo and Jerry Yang
created the Yahoo! Directory as a collection of their favorite web pages
(which they named as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"); the
World Wide Web at that time was just a toddler – four years old!
When they first met, Sergey, a movie buff (like me! I have a collection of
over 1500 movies!) was excited about an idea that involved creating a movie
rating system. However, Larry’s energy and interest in varied subjects was
infectious and Sergey started working with Larry on various projects.
They took full advantage of the weaknesses in Yahoo!’s Value statement
(especially Clause # 6 about Fun that reads: “We believe humor is essential
to success. We applaud irreverence and don't take ourselves too seriously.
We celebrate achievement. We yodel.”) (What is amazing about Yahoo!’s
Value System
is that it in retrospect it completely falls flat on its face! They failed
on almost all the points.
Check it out
for yourself.)
Whilst Yahoo! was yodeling, Google was creating the critical concept of
Googling.
Within a few years of Google being born, the American Dialect Society chose
the word “google” as the "most useful word of 2002." It was officially added
to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006, and to the eleventh
edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July 2006. (The
first recorded usage of google used as a verb was on July 8, 1998, by Google
founder Larry Page himself, who wrote on a mailing list: "Have fun and keep
googling!" a testimony to his vision.)
Astrologers around the world may concur that many heavenly bodies aligned to
create a sensation like Google. Heavenly bodies or not, many factors worked
almost simultaneously in Google’s favor.
It was Netscape’s IPO in August 1995 that created a lot of interest in
Internet companies. Netscape went public at $28 a share, which skyrocketed
to $75 and share on the opening day itself!
If one tried to gauge the mood at Stanford just after the Netscape IPO, it
was one of “the smell of money” (as David Vise points out in his book “The
Google Story”.) The University, he writes, (unlike MIT) did not see a
conflict between academics and financial rewards. Stanford’s reward? The
patent of PageRank, Google’s link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page
is actually held by Stanford University! The university received 1.8 million
shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in
2005 by the university for $336 million.
To be continued……..
Prakash
Subbarao |
About Prakash |
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13 June2010
