Google’s original hardware Setup in 1997 and How the search giant Evolved
Big G has revolutionized the way we seek Information In the Internet.It is really Inspiring to see how Google has evolved from a Research project to a Search giant and changed the World.
Some Trivia
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, when they were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. They felt the need of a search engine that would analyze the relationships between websites and would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques.
Their search engine was originally nicknamed “BackRub” because the system checked Backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.They rented a garage from Susan Wojcicki (now Vice president of Google product management) for $1,700 per month because she wanted some help paying the mortgage.
The Hardware set up of Google search Engine in 1997
Back in early 1997, the entire search engine and website ran on the following hardware setup:
1.Sun Ultra II with Dual 200 Mhz and only 256 Mb of RAM.The original project (called Backrub ) ran on this machine.
2.Intel donated 2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers with 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. The main search ran on these.
3.IBM donated RS/6000 with 4 processors, 512MB of RAM and 8 x 9GB hard drives.
4.The original Storage of Backrub contained two additional boxes.This contained 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively
5.IBM further donated disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives.
6.A home made Disk was also Used which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.
The original Google platform was written in java and Python and ran on the hardware as shown in the following presentation
More Hardware descriptions are available here.The backrub Website as appeared in 1997 can be seen here.Thanks Pingdom
Some Important Google Milestones and how they Evolved
1995 Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders) meet at Stanford. (Larry was 22 and Sergey was 21)
1996 Both Started Working on a project called BackRub. The project Operated On Stanford Servers for 1 year consuming heavy bandwidth.
1997 Larry and Sergey decided that a new name should be given and after much brainstorming, the name came as “Google”.
1998 August Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to Google Inc,an entity that doesn’t existed yet.On September 1998,Google sets up the 1st workspace at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he was a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford.
1998 December “PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes it as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
1999 February Google outgrew their garage office and moved to new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just 8 employees.
2000 May Google releases 10 language versions of Google.com
2000 June Google forged a partnership with Yahoo! to become their default search provider.Google became the World’s largest search engine by crawling and indexing the first Billion URL’s.
2000 October Google launches AdWords with 350 customers. On December Google Toolbar is released.
2001 March Eric Schmidt is named chairman of the board of directors. Google.com is available in 26 languages. On July Google image search launches offering access to 250 million images.
2002 May Google Labs for users is released to try out beta technologies.On September Google News launches with 4000 news sources.Till then Google had already crawled 3 billion Web documents.
2003 February Google Acquired Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger. A new Era of Information Explosion begins.
2003 March Google acquired Applied Semantics whose technology runs the thing we know as Google Adsense.
2004 March Google Moves to the new “Googleplex” at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View
The rest as we all know is History. Read the entire Corporate History of Google
