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Google - Our History in Depth

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99 pointswtpiu45 comments

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Sergey Brin probably had the snazziest profile picture in those times:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www-db.stan...

http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www-db.stan...

I laugh.

Anticipating Tumblr by a decade.

One interesting thing that stood out in terms of Google-the-startup: they incorporated on Sep 4, 1998 and raised $25 million in June 1999, and made their first acquisition in February 2001. The traction they must have been able to show must have staggering.

Keep in mind that (1) the standards for impressive traction were a lot lower back then, and (2) this happened when the first .com bubble was picking up a ton of steam.

I wonder if they're old enough -- of prescient enough -- yet to realize they should probably have a staff historian.

Better to have others write your history than yourself. Less hubris that way. History has it's own way to deal with the notability criterion: everything that's not notable will be forgotten.

Lot of firsts in 1999:

First dog

First chef

First non-engineering hire

First press release

First female engineer seems to be missing...

They may not have had a first female engineer, but in their first 21 employees, 6 of which were females.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-first-20-employees-wh...

I was making a little joke - I thought it was widely known that Marissa Mayer was Google's first female engineer.

Source: her wikipedia page, numerous articles.

Yeah, I was a little saddened to see that they didn't mention her - sure she went to work for the competition but it'd have been classy to mention her.

When did Slashdot first mention Google? That is when I first heard of it

That would be December 20 1998 in an article 'Good new search engine running on linux'

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/98/12/20/2348230/good-new-se...

I just read this article on David Cheriton over the weekend: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/08/01/professor-bil...

And surprisingly, the Google Timeline doesn't include him in there (though he should probably be listed around the 1998 time that Andy Bechtolsheim wrote his check...unless they both contributed to the same check?).

I thought that basically David Cheriton made the introduction to Andy, invited the founders and Andy over to his house, and then Andy decided "Cool, lemme write you a check", and then David was like "While I'm here, lemme write you one too." In contemporary fundraising parlance, Andy led the round and David co-invested. The circumstances are covered in a bit more detail in In The Plex, although IIRC that didn't say that David invested, only that the meeting was at his house.

My guess is that David Cheriton, famous for keeping a low profile, didn't want it to be known that he was a billionaire through Google, and they honored that wish. But sometime fairly recently somebody else outed him (I recall reading an article a couple years ago that mentioned him as Silicon Valley's wealthiest unknown billionaire), and at that point the cat's outta the bag.

No mention of their funding from the National Science Foundation that helped them get off the ground?

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306

I get this page in Dutch. I didn't ask for it and I can't change it. In fact, I'm logged in with an account which only has one language preference set (English), which Google happily ignores whenever it feels like.

And it would be merely annoying if it only affected the interface language, but it changes features, search results and in this case the entire content.

Which makes it pretty much impossible to participate in this discussion in HN.

This is one of the reasons why by now I dislike Google as much as I disliked Microsoft back in 90's.

Some people may find it hard to identify with, but imagine communicating with someone you know speaks perfect English, who you have politely requested to communicate in English, and who actually speaks English to everyone else in the room except you.

There are less offensive ways to say "fuck you".

This is a huge overreaction.

Not really, I feel exactly the same and as it's the top comment I guess a lot of other people do as well. I know it certainly comes up regularly both in the office (people traveling get very annoyed when Google decides they should fluently read the language of the country they're working in for that week) and among friends as a source of constant frustration.

Google isn't alone in doing it either, Bing has slavishly copied this absolute idiotic stupidity although they aren't anywhere near as insulting about it as Google _yet_ (e.g. where Google, Wordpress, Youtube etc. show it in the language it geolocates you to rather than either your browser's language or your profile's language)

Did I mention changing features (omitting some, changing the navigation to others) and search results (Stack Overflow tends not to show up in local searches in language xyz) ?

And all this with no language/region switch in sight? Except the one inside the account settings, which Google then randomly ignores?

What would you consider to be the appropriate reaction to such a user experience?

Or just imagine clicking on the link at the top of this threat and ending up on a page called "Onze geschiedenis tot in detail", which contains a truly awful, low quality and barely readable Dutch "translation" with no obvious way of accessing the content people are actually discussing here.

Would this put you in a good mood?

Most Google services accept and honor a "hl" URL parameter. So it would be http://www.google.com/about/company/history/?hl=en for English, and hl=nl for Dutch (not that you want it). No cookie cleaning is needed :)

Delete your google cookies then resign in.

And it's comment #1!

Try adding ?hl=en to the URL. A similar situation happened to my wife after visiting Germany, we had to edit her cookies and clear the "hl" parameter (IIRC) because various random Google sites were entirely in German.

If only browsers sent some kind of message to the server to tell it what languages you'd prefer

They do, and have since at least the mid 90s. But most users don't know how to set this preference, so Google assumes GeoIP is the One Source Of Truth(TM) for language (apart from hl= and being signed in).

I don't think you had your sarcasm filter turned on there.

"Try adding ?hl=en to the URL"

How about suing a new fucking search engine, DDG or Bing?!!! Do this for that, that for that and we'll need a college degree on Google searching. I travel so my searches used to automatically transfer to google.cctld. No thanks!

Yeah but as Google do it so does Bing (after all why not copy Google's arrogance as well)

Just in case anyone is interested for Bing you have to use "?mkt=en-GB" (for example)

Strange that Gmail is not mentioned in 2004 unless I am missing it! They mention Chat for Gmail but not Gmail?

As far as I remember, GMail was announced on April 1st, 2004 and was considered by most (all?) an April Fool's joke.

I noticed the same thing. The first mention of Gmail is when they launched it for mobile in the US in December of 2005.

Cool, I just discovered that they have Inactive Account Management.

https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive

The Link for 2013 is actually pointing to 2011 - AM missing somethign here ? :-)

Probably just a sign that this page is hand coded!

:-) Any how do I report this to get fixed ? Couldn't just keep seeing this mistake!

Wow! Is this new, or has it been out for a while?

Just finished reading Steven Levy's book on Google - amazing read and insight into Google's history.

This has been out for a while.

I was consulting it back in March 2013 for details I could use for my http://gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns so I know it goes at least that far back.

But you can also punch it into the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20120401000000*/http://www.google...) and see that it goes back at least to March 2012. As it happens, as part of the previous research I know that a lot of Google content moves around various URLs without redirects, so between that and how the first IA version is comprehensive, I strongly suspected that it was much older than March 2012; one useful trick for finding the original URL is to look for quotes of the page on other websites which point at a different URL. In this case, if you quote the bit starting with "Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford...." (the first entry) and you search in Google with a date-limit of 1995-2010 (in the 'Search Tools' option), you can see hits dated from 2005, 2008, & 2009. The 2005 would be best, but it's some sort of spammy junk, so I try another hit, and it links to 'http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/#start' which is quite different. That takes me back to August 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080401000000*/http://www.google... We can't search for this because it's broken but it tells us that we can narrow our timerange even more, to early 2008. Another hit includes a 'trackback' link to another Google URL, which I duly load up: http://web.archive.org/web/20020223143331/http://www.google.... Useless, since it's not the timeline - but notice the sidebar! 'Timline', bingo. Now we can go all the way back to December 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20011213165211/http://www.google....

So, this page was started at least as early as December 2001.

I'd like to know more about what happened between 1995-'96. Besides their introduction, how did they become partners? Were they office mates?

Seems to be missing the word "reader"

It doesn't exist. It never existed.

They really need to add in the 'deaths' or transitions of their products as well.

This is really great ! Especially all the April fool days Google gave us.

It reminds me of one of my friend. He had to explain "How Google works" in the class. He accidentally read half of this prank:

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

and explained it in the class. Everyone enjoyed !

But the thing to be noticed most was that most of the students, including the reached believed ! !

Timelines are a tough, sometimes misleading/information-hiding format...they have a systematic look akin to data, but are much closer to regular editorial content in how they're produced.

Case in point, the Person Finder is mentioned twice on the Timeline, for the Tokyo Earthquake and the Boston Marathon bombings, but not for the event at which it was conceived -- Hurricane Katrina (correction at bottom) -- something that was arguably a more epic disaster than the bombings or earthquake, while at the same time being a much bigger and more surprising technical feat at the time...given that it was 2005, when Facebook and the social web had been barely a product.

- My bad, Google's actual adoption of Person Finder was during Haiti in 2010, which, well predates both Tokyo and Boston and was definitely a bigger disaster in terms of human life than both. But Haiti isn't mentioned in the Google timeline

https://support.google.com/personfinder/?hl=en

But the Tokyo earthquake and Boston bombings are more fresh in our mind, hence their greater prominence on a timeline generated from today's perspective.

(Not criticizing anything in particular about the OP, just pointing out that timelines can be just as obfuscating as they are clarifying, and the Person Finder example stuck out to me)

A good marketing piece.

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