Google. A breakthrough in the spirit of the times. Mark Mulsid, David A. Wise

Lori, I found everything I was looking for when I met you.
To my parents, Roger and Zoryana

Preface.
Dear readers, before you is the most unusual historical book. Is it possible to write the history of a company that is barely eight years old, and at the time of writing the book in the original language even less?! It turns out it's possible.
So, here is the history of Google. A story that happened before our eyes - which we did not even suspect! The story of how two young Stanford graduate students revolutionized the lives of our generation. In general, before you is the latest history of the world. The world where Stanford is the cradle of civilization.
We live in an era of technological revolution. Over the past 25 years, the processors in our computers have become three thousand times faster, but RAM has fallen in price by 30 thousand times, and hard drives - by 3.6 million (!!!) times. And so, as expected, the right people were in the right place at the right time ...

The invention of Google technology can be compared to the invention of the wheel. Today, as time passes, it is not clear how it was possible to search the Internet before the advent of Google. Like all genius, the Google search engine is very simple...
However, the company's success is due not only to the favorable conditions for supporting technological breakthroughs that developed a decade ago in Silicon Valley. Young scientists who chose the difficult path of entrepreneurship had excellent advisers. At the start, Sergey and Larry talked a lot with Jeff Bezos from Amazon com (by the way, Jeff was one of the first Google investors), Yossi Vardy, the creator of ICQ, and others. It was these people who at different times challenged the existing distribution of forces in the computer world. Is there anyone missing from this list? Of course, Apple. We know that in mid-2006, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, became a member of the board of directors of Apple Computers!
However, the founders of Google themselves are characterized by entrepreneurial insight. Brin and Page have always been distinguished by non-standard approaches to business and non-standard actions. Now, few remember how the Russian Prime Minister turned the plane around and returned home when the war in Yugoslavia began, and what this decision led to. But the business community is happy discusses the conclusion of a very large contract, concluded thanks to the unexpected decision of Sergey and Larry to land the plane instead of Madrid in London.
Today, Google has ceased to be a part of exclusively American life and culture. 67% of Internet users live outside the US - 77% of the Internet audience does not speak English as their first language. But they all use Google to search. That's why Google speaks so many languages: it has more than a hundred living languages ​​in its arsenal, as well as dead ones (like Latin), artificial ones (Esperanto), and fictional ones (the language of the race from the planet Clinton from the Startrek series). Google allows users to search for information in any language and use linguistic technology to understand what is being said.
I want to warn you: there is a large group of people who should not read this book under any circumstances. These are students and teachers of business schools. Why, you ask? Yes, because in almost every chapter there are examples of the overthrow of all the theories taught in these schools! Want to make sure? Please!

Can a company achieve incredible turnover ($6.1 billion in 2006!) from scratch without investing a single cent in advertising of any kind (television, radio, magazines, billboards, etc.), relying only on viral marketing and word of mouth radio? Yes! Maybe!
Can a company whose home page is the most visited page on the Internet, where advertising per pixel costs absolutely crazy money, deliberately not place a single advertisement on this page and still be incredibly profitable? Yes! Maybe!
Can a company whose logo is one of the most recognizable and, of course, the most expensive, periodically change this logo in honor of holidays, and not state ones, but, for example, on the occasion of the birthday of the artist Edvard Munch? Yes maybe!
Can a company with a huge turnover per employee consciously allow them 20% of their working time to do what they are interested in - and this, imagine, one working day a week! - and at the same time feed them lunches, arrange cabinets with juices, nuts, allow them to play billiards and bring pets to the office? Yes maybe!
Can a company break all the unwritten rules of Wall Street when going public and, as a result, have the most high-profile IPO in twenty-first century? Yes maybe! (As sad as it is for those same investment bankers and the Securities and Exchange Commission!)
If this book does fall into the hands of some business school professor, I can't guarantee that there will be no problems: either the book or the professor's mind will suffer.
So, before you is the story of a company that decided to organize all the information in the world and make it accessible and useful to everyone. A company that sets and solves impossible problems - simply because it is not interesting to solve simple problems!
V. Dolgov,
representative office director
Google in Russia

Introduction.
More than 500 years have passed since the invention of the printing press. Thanks to Gutenberg's brainchild, books and scientific works have finally become widespread, but this invention can hardly be compared with the system that has brought so many benefits to people and facilitated access to a wide variety of information - Google. Its colorful logo on a snow-white background is familiar to everyone. The magical search engine is capable of generating billions of relevant links per day, which has fundamentally changed the way we search for information and news. That's why Google has become extremely in demand in a short time. For millions of people around the world, Google and the Internet are already synonymous. Information hunger has been satisfied for some time now by "google" on a computer or cell phone. Users of all ages are so attached to this search engine that they no longer imagine their existence without it.

The excellent quality of work attracts a wide range of people to Google - from beginners to specialists who trust the brand, which has become their faithful assistant. His charm allows him to overcome cultural, linguistic and geographical barriers and gain fans on all continents. For a young company that hasn't spent a single cent on promoting its brand, this is a huge achievement. Google is constantly growing: users who are convinced of the quality of its services recommend the search engine to their friends and acquaintances. In addition, materials about the company regularly appear in print and electronic media. Madison Avenue marketers, on the other hand, are completely uninvolved in this growth.

Turning to Google for any reason is a habit for many people. In today's unstable world, he has become one of the rare reliable sources free information.

Unfortunately, few Google users know how the company was created, why it began to grow so rapidly, overtaking more powerful competitors, what awaits it in the future. On the pages of this book, we will answer these questions for the first time. Until now, this information has been a secret behind seven seals, carefully stored within the walls of the Googleplex, the company's state-of-the-art Silicon Valley complex.

John Hennessy, Chancellor of Stanford University and member of the Board of Directors of Google, a well-known specialist in computer technology, notes the company's uniqueness in the modern world of high technologies: it is a leader not only in software development, but also in the production of computers. Improving the process of information retrieval and related services is due to the unique software (SW) installed on hundreds of thousands of machines that are assembled by the company's employees themselves. The optimal combination of technologies allows you to get excellent results in a fraction of a second. No other language has a word that can describe such a successful combination of hardware and software, which is why we call this phenomenon "Googleware".

According to Hennessy, the most important technical advantage of Google is that all the computers used to search for information are assembled and configured by employees of the company. This is probably her main know-how. Most people consider a personal computer (PC) as useful furniture, but Google assembles and builds inexpensive computers on its own, constantly increasing their power and quantity (today about a hundred thousand). Employees mount them on long racks, connecting them to locally produced software. No other company has a PC network as powerful as Google's. “Their computer system is the largest in the world,” Hennessy notes. “It is unlikely that anyone can boast of something like that.”

Today, in the era of niche, Google employees assemble and connect PCs in special rooms that are closed to outsiders, including visitors to the Googleplex. With such a scale of production, doing it on your own is more profitable than acquiring ready-made ones, both financially and in terms of quality. Functioning as links in a single chain, PCs quickly search for information by breaking down the phrase in the query string into separate components. These components are simultaneously processed and compared with texts on copies of web pages that are indexed and organized in advance.

With such powerful hardware, Google is able to interact with millions of servers every day, delivering search results promptly and without interruption