Frugal Google

           Google was founded in January of 1996 by two men, by the names of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were attending Stanford University in California. In 1996, Page and Brin began developing a search engine called BackRub. After this search engine started taking up too much bandwidth at Stanford University, Page and Brin decided to rename the search engine calling it Google (the number one followed by 100 zero’s). They decided to come up with the name  Google to have an infinite amount of information on the internet.

In August of 1998, after Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, gave Page and Brin a cheque for $100,000, the two men opened up a bank account and deposited their cheque. In 2000, Google began selling text-based advertisements at five cents per click. In 2007, the word “google” was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Ninety-nine percent of Google’s revenue comes from web advertising services called AdWords and AdSense. Advertisers submit ads to Google that include a list of keywords relating to the product, service, or business. When someone uses one or more of the advertisement’s key words, the ad appears in a sidebar. Every time someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser pays Google. With AdSense, a webmaster puts ads into his/her own site. Google’s spiders crawl the site and analyze the content. Google then selects key words relevant to the webmasters site. Every time someone clicks on an ad on the webmaster’s site, the webmaster receives a portion of the ad revenue and Google gets the rest. It is because of advertising that Google made $29 billion of revenue in 2010.

Google Checkout is designed to make online purchases easier. When someone visits a store that subscribes to Google Checkout, he/she can click on the checkout option and Google will help with the transaction. Google charges a two percent plus twenty cent fee per transaction.

Google processes over one billion search requests every day.