Google Search Engine 1999

Google Get $25 Million!

Google, Inc., a leading innovator of advanced Internet search technology, today announced that it topped the list of search engines that showed significant month-over-month growth in unique audience size in July, according to Nielsen//NetRatings results released this week.

The Nielsen//NetRatings report showed that while unique audience growth for the Top Ten Portals/Search Engines in July increased only 2.1 percent, Google led the pack of search engines that show significant growth by posting an 88 percent gain in unique visitors in July.

"Internet users in increasing numbers are finding that there is a difference in search quality," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and chief executive officer. "Google's advanced, powerful approach to search is making it easier than ever for people to find what they're looking for on the Internet. Traffic on our website has increased 50 percent per month since the company's inception. This increase in unique visitors to the Google site is being fueled by word of mouth --- people with good Google experiences telling other people about Google."

"Our mission is to provide the best search experience on the web," added Sergey Brin, Google president and co-founder. "Everything we do is focused on delivering the highest quality search results through significant advancements in interface design, relevancy, and scalability."

In addition to its own destination search site (www.google.com), Google recently announced an agreement with Netscape, a subsidiary of AOL (NYSE: AOL), to incorporate Google's search as the fall-through search for Netscape Search, and to feature Google as a premier search provider on the Netcenter portal.

The Nielsen//NetRatings study was released Aug. 16, 1999 and monitors web sites by property, domain, and unique site. Nielsen//NetRatings defines a property as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single entity. Unique audience is measured by the total number of individuals that visit a property. Rankings are based on audience sampling of U.S. Internet households. 

grass roots feeling to it. "We have thought of having a button saying 'give me less commercial results'," but the company has shied away from implementing this yet.

On the road again

Google quickly outgrew the confines of its Menlo Park home, and by February 1999 had moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto. At eight employees, Google's staff had nearly tripled, and the service was answering more than 500,000 queries per day. Interest in the company had grown as well. Red Hat signed on as its first commercial search customer, drawn in part by Google's commitment to running its servers on the open source operating system Linux.

On June 7, the company announced that it had secured a round of funding that included $25 million from the two leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a replay of the convergence of opposites that gave birth to Google, the two firms — normally fiercely competitive, but seeing eye-to-eye on the value of this new investment — both took seats on the board of directors. Mike Moritz of Sequoia and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins — who between them had helped grow Sun Microsytems, Intuit, Amazon, and Yahoo! — joined Ram Shriram, CEO of Junglee, at the ping pong table that served as formal boardroom furniture.

In short order, key hires began to fill the company's modest offices. Omid Kordestani left Netscape to accept a position as vice president of business development and sales, and Urs Hölzle was hired away from UC Santa Barbara as vice president of engineering. It quickly became obvious that more space was needed. At one point the office became so cramped that employees couldn't stand up from their desks without others tucking their chairs in first.

No beta search engine

The gridlock was alleviated with the move to the Googleplex, Google's current headquarters in Mountain View, California. And tucked away in one corner of the two-story structure, the Google kernel continued to grow — attracting staff and clients and drawing attention from users and the press. AOL/Netscape selected Google as its web search service and helped push traffic levels past 3 million searches per day. Clearly, Google had evolved. What had been a college research project was now a real company offering a service that was in great demand.

On September 21, 1999, the beta label came off the website.

Still Google continued to expand. The Italian portal Virgilio signed on as a client, as did Virgin Net, the UK's leading online entertainment guide. The spate of recognition that followed included a Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development from PC Magazine and inclusion in several "best of" lists, culminating with Google's appearance on Time magazine's Top Ten Best Cybertech list for 1999.