History of Google and Google Books

The now multinational public cloud computing and Internet search technologies corporation, had its beginning in 1995 when its creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. By 1996, Page and Brin created the first incarnation of Google, BackRub, which after a year, started to take up too much bandwidth on the University servers. And by 2007, BackRub underwent a name change inspired by the mathematical term of a number with 1000 zeroes. They believed “googol” reflected their mission to “organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web”, and thus, Google was born.

By 1998, Google got its funding from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim in a check for $100,000 and Google Inc sets up shop in a garage and hires its first employee. By December, PC Magazine recognizes Google for its, “uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes them as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.

In the years following, Google grew in loyal Internet users and has grown both economically and in the services they provide. Google Maps, Gmail, Google Doc and Google Books are just some of the technologies that Google now offers, coming a long way from the garage and $100,000 check they once had.

What makes Google different than other search engines of the time is the “PageRank” system. Existing search engines of the time would produce results based on how many times the search term appeared on a web page, Page rank on the other hand is an analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical value to a webpage based on its importance to the web. When one website links to another website, it gains importance on this scale. However, this is not the only factor in determining what website comes up when searched, but it is an important one.

In 2002, Google started to brainstorm a secret books project that all started with the question, how long would it take to digitally scan every book in the world? The question still remains unanswered by that day, Larry Page experiments with a 300-page book, timing how long it takes to turn each page. It took 40 minutes to reach the end.

Larry Page first reached out to his alma mater of the University of Michigan about their library’s seven million volumes. The university estimates that scanning the entire library would take 1,000 years, Google believes in can make it happen in six.
In December of 2004, Google announces the official beginning of “Google Print” library project, the includes a partnership with Harvard, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, Oxford and Stanford. The combined collections estimate to contain over 15 million volumes.

In 2005, Google Print is renamed Google Books and over the years more libraries all over the world join Google Books to help the digital library project.