Google's founders opposed advertising, which now brings in nearly three-quarters of revenue
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started out against putting advertising on their search engine. As years passed without profit they relented, but on strict terms: every ad had to match the search words, and ads could appear on only 15 per cent of searches. By 2025, advertising supplied 73 per cent of Google's revenue.
Google began in January 1996 as a Stanford research project. Its core idea, PageRank, judged a website's importance by the pages linking to it, and a colleague named Scott Hassan wrote much of the early code. The name came from a misspelling of googol, the number written as a 1 followed by 100 zeros, chosen to suggest just how much of the web it meant to search. When the company was set up in 1998, the founders worked out of their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage.
Money arrived quickly. In August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a cheque for 100,000 dollars after a short demo, which pushed the pair to incorporate so they could cash it. Amazon's Jeff Bezos also invested that year. By June 1999 the venture firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia led a 25 million dollar round, and in 2001 investors got the outside chief executive they wanted in Eric Schmidt, after one reportedly threatened to demand its money back.
The advertising machine evolved in stages. AdWords began in October 2000 selling text ads priced per thousand views, and in 2002 switched to charging per click, with prices set by auction, which rewarded advertisers whose ads people actually found useful. AdSense followed in 2003, placing ads on other people's websites and splitting the fee. By 2003 the company's name had become a verb in major dictionaries.
Its public listing in August 2004 valued Google at more than 23 billion dollars, with a share structure giving the founders ten votes per special share so they could focus on the long term. Acquisitions widened its reach, including DeepMind in 2014, whose AlphaGo in 2016 became the first program to beat a top professional at Go.
Source: Google
