In the beginning, Google was nothing more than a research project developed by two Stanford graduate students.  In 1996, Sergey Brin and Larry Page had developed a search engine with a unique method of ranking search results.  As the need for a relevant search engine on the internet became clearer and clearer, Brin and Page registered the Google.com domain in 1997 and officially formed Google, Inc. on September 7, 1998.  Google had an advantage over other search engines at the time because their search results were ranked in a relevant manner; based on the number of sites linking to each specific page.  Because of the high quality search results and their simple approach to searching, Google’s popularity has grown substantially over time.  Along with their growth in popularity, Google has grown to employ more than 10,000 people worldwide, while also being ranked as the best company to work for by Fortune Magazine.  The term ‘google’ was derived from a misspelling of the word ‘googol,’ which refers to 10¹⁰⁰, and the name stuck.  Also, due to the popularity of the world ‘google,’ Merriam-Webster added the term to their dictionary defining google as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.”  As ‘googling’ things became more commonplace, Google’s revenues grew tremendously through the use of advertisements.  Although Google’s advertising revenues have risen every year in the past five years, Google went public on August 19, 2004 , offering 19,605,052 shares at $85 per share.  Since then, Google’s stock price has ascended to more than $500 in early 2007.  While Google’s initial market capitalization was roughly $1.7 billion, that figure has ballooned to more than $157 billion in subsequent years.  In addition, Google has made many acquisitions to allow for continued innovation.

While Google has acquired more than 30 companies since its inception, a few important ones stick out.  In 2003, the acquisition of Applied Semantics, Inc further developed their advertising campaign, allowing for advertisements relevant to the context of each page.  In early 2006, Writely, a web-based word processing firm, was acquired, which laid the ground work for Google Docs to be released.  In late 2006, Google outbid other competitors to acquire Youtube for $1.65 billion.  The Youtube acquisition is interesting because since then, both the website and the company of the popular video site have remained unchanged, almost remaining a completely separate entity.  In early 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick, a large advertising competitor for $3.1 billion.  Since then, anti-trust issues have arisen and there has not been much development as a result.  Around the same time, Google acquired Tonic Systems, which is used for adapting Microsoft PowerPoint files into html and PDF documents.  This is significant because, when paired with web-based document and spreadsheet software, Google will be actively competing with Microsoft Office.  Since then, a few other acquisitions have been made, but they mostly have been for internal company use, including video conferencing, graphics optimization, and security software.