The founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, first met in 1995 at Standford University. Initially working from their dorm rooms on a September 1996 research grant(s), they began to built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They initially called this search engine Backrub, then soon renamed it Google, initially hosted at Stanford University and then moved to google.com. It’s stated mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” [1, 2, 3, 7]
Following a $100,000 grant in August 1998 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Larry and Sergey incorporated Google on September 4, 1998 and moved into a garage! In less than a year, on June 7, 1999, they received equity funding totalling $25 million from major venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, and thus two new board members John Doerr and Michael Moritz respectively. The intent is for Google to be the “gold standard for search on the Internet.”
In August 19, 2004 the company was legally forced to go public, making it’s shareholders very rich.
But is this the full story behind the Google search-engine beginnings and intent?
A 1993 Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] white paper states the Intelligence Community (IC) “is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products,” The IC held a briefing for scientists at a conference in May 23, 1995, and one in 1994. [4]
“In 1995, one of the first and most promising [CI/NSF] MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants.” “The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set”. [5, 6]
“Google is a search engine company whose growth has brought it to the first rank, and that is growing faster than any of its competitors. Its core technology…was partially supported by this grant.” The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, only this NSF “digital libraries” grant.