A brief history of Google search engine.

JumpStation was created in December 1993 by Jonathon Fletcher and was the first search engine that used a web robot to find web pages and build an index. It used an HTML form as the human interface. It is generally accepted as the first web resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine, crawling, indexing, and searching.

Soon after the first all text crawler based search engine, WebCrawler, was launched. Unlike JumpStation, users could search for any word contained any page. This became the norm for search engines. Then in 1994, Lycos, developed at Carnegie Mellon University was launched and became the first search engine to attract funds and become a commercial venture. Soon after, many search engines were developed. They included Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, AltaVista and Yahoo!

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed Google it wasn't meant to be a search engine as such. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). Page was researching the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web as a dissertation theme. He studied the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page. The theory was that the number and nature of back links could be used for an mathematical analysis of that page. This data would help with the cataloging of the SDLP.

Larry was joined in his research, nicknamed "BackRub", by Sergey Brin who was already a close friend. Larry and Sergey had met during the summer of 1995. Their new software, called a web crawler, began crawling the web in March 1996, with Larry Page's own Stanford home page used as the only starting point. To convert back link data that it gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm. BackRub is written in Java and Python and ran on several Sun Ultras using Intel Pentium processors running Linux.

BackRub's data produced by the PageRank algorithm consisted of a list of back links ranked by importance for every URL. Larry and Sergey soon realized that a search engine based on PageRank would be far superior to the existing search engines. They ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page.

About the same time a search engine called RankDex was being developed by Robin Li at IDD Services. He was using a similar strategy for site scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex was later used later when Li founded Baidu in China. Baidu is now the leading search engine in China.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin used the PageRank algorithm and another based on the existing technology used in search engines, now known as keywords, in their new search engine which they decided to call Google. Originally their search engine used the Stanford web site with the domain google.stanford.edu . The google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997.

By the end of 1998 Google had over 60 web pages indexed and was getting good reviews in editorials for their superior search results and advanced technology. They've built up a loyal following among Internet users, who like its simple design. Today Google operates 70 offices in over 40 countries. It is the World's leading brand and largest advertising company.

Google continue to strive to give their searchers the most appropriate and relevant web page results. Larry Page is often cited as saying his aim is to develop AI, artificial intelligence to deliver the best possible results for searchers. Their software development capabilities can only be described as awesome, among the World's greatest. The search algorithm is always being developed and is believed to be be updated daily.

As part of their mission to return relevant web pages they have done all they can to counteract search engine optimization techniques. They recently relented slightly and now encourage what they term "white hat" SEO and have drawn up a best practice guide for web masters. At the same time they stepped up their campaign against what they term "black hat" SEO and now remove web sites from their index that fail to adhere to their best practice guidelines.