7 ms·

Google - Our History in Depth

99 points by wtpiu 13y ago

samspenc 13y ago
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.
- gwern 13y ago
  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 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.com/about/company/history/ 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' 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.com/corporate/timeline/ 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.com/corporate/tech.html 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.com/corporate/timeline.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011213165211/http://www.google.... So, this page was started at least as early as December 2001.
danso 13y ago
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 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)
karthik_sripal 13y ago
The Link for 2013 is actually pointing to 2011 - AM missing somethign here ? :-)
- kanamekun 13y ago
  Probably just a sign that this page is hand coded!
  - karthiksripal 13y ago
    :-) Any how do I report this to get fixed ? Couldn't just keep seeing this mistake!
eitally 13y ago
I wonder if they're old enough -- of prescient enough -- yet to realize they should probably have a staff historian.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  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.
reledi 13y ago
I'd like to know more about what happened between 1995-'96. Besides their introduction, how did they become partners? Were they office mates?
finnh 13y ago
Lot of firsts in 1999: First dog First chef First non-engineering hire First press release First female engineer seems to be missing...
- srhngpr 13y ago
  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-where-are-they-now-2012-7?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-first-20-employees-wh...
  - finnh 13y ago
    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.
    - bitops 13y ago
      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.
sksk 13y ago
Strange that Gmail is not mentioned in 2004 unless I am missing it! They mention Chat for Gmail but not Gmail?
- srhngpr 13y ago
  I noticed the same thing. The first mention of Gmail is when they launched it for mobile in the US in December of 2005.
- sakis 13y ago
  As far as I remember, GMail was announced on April 1st, 2004 and was considered by most (all?) an April Fool's joke.
orware 13y ago
I just read this article on David Cheriton over the weekend: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/08/01/professor-billionaire-david-cheriton/ 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?).
- nostrademons 13y ago
  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.
melange 13y ago
A good marketing piece.
ateevchopra 13y ago
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 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 ! !
yid 13y ago
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.
- ohazi 13y ago
  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.
xSwag 13y ago
Sergey Brin probably had the snazziest profile picture in those times: http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www-db.stan...
- dictum 13y ago
  Anticipating Tumblr by a decade.
- thiagoc 13y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www-db.stan... I laugh.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
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".
- twinge 13y ago
  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.
  - mavhc 13y ago
    If only browsers sent some kind of message to the server to tell it what languages you'd prefer
    - cbhl 13y ago
      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).
      - timClicks 13y ago
        I don't think you had your sarcasm filter turned on there.
  - bsullivan01 13y ago
mongol 13y ago
When did Slashdot first mention Google? That is when I first heard of it
- arkem 13y ago
  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-search-engine-running-on-linux http://linux.slashdot.org/story/98/12/20/2348230/good-new-se...
fuqua 13y ago
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/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306
jensenbox 13y ago
They really need to add in the 'deaths' or transitions of their products as well.
spurgu 13y ago
Cool, I just discovered that they have Inactive Account Management. https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bumbledraven 13y ago
Seems to be missing the word "reader"
- nnethercote 13y ago
  It doesn't exist. It never existed.

99 points by wtpiu 13y ago

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.

gwern 13y ago
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 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.com/about/company/history/ 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' 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.com/corporate/timeline/ 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.com/corporate/tech.html 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.com/corporate/timeline.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011213165211/http://www.google.... So, this page was started at least as early as December 2001.

danso 13y ago

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 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)

karthik_sripal 13y ago

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

kanamekun 13y ago
Probably just a sign that this page is hand coded!
- karthiksripal 13y ago
  :-) Any how do I report this to get fixed ? Couldn't just keep seeing this mistake!

eitally 13y ago

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

jacquesm 13y ago
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.

reledi 13y ago

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

finnh 13y ago

Lot of firsts in 1999: First dog First chef First non-engineering hire First press release First female engineer seems to be missing...

srhngpr 13y ago
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-where-are-they-now-2012-7?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-first-20-employees-wh...
- finnh 13y ago
  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.
  - bitops 13y ago
    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.

sksk 13y ago

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

srhngpr 13y ago
I noticed the same thing. The first mention of Gmail is when they launched it for mobile in the US in December of 2005.
sakis 13y ago
As far as I remember, GMail was announced on April 1st, 2004 and was considered by most (all?) an April Fool's joke.

orware 13y ago

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

nostrademons 13y ago
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.

melange 13y ago

A good marketing piece.

ateevchopra 13y ago

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 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 ! !

yid 13y ago

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.

ohazi 13y ago
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.

xSwag 13y ago

Sergey Brin probably had the snazziest profile picture in those times: http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www-db.stan...

dictum 13y ago
Anticipating Tumblr by a decade.
thiagoc 13y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/photos/drag96.jpg http://web.archive.org/web/20021030152640/http://www-db.stan... I laugh.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

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".

twinge 13y ago
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.
- mavhc 13y ago
  If only browsers sent some kind of message to the server to tell it what languages you'd prefer
  - cbhl 13y ago
    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).
    - timClicks 13y ago
      I don't think you had your sarcasm filter turned on there.
- bsullivan01 13y ago

mongol 13y ago

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

arkem 13y ago
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-search-engine-running-on-linux http://linux.slashdot.org/story/98/12/20/2348230/good-new-se...

fuqua 13y ago

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

jensenbox 13y ago

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

spurgu 13y ago

Cool, I just discovered that they have Inactive Account Management. https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bumbledraven 13y ago

Seems to be missing the word "reader"

nnethercote 13y ago
It doesn't exist. It never existed.