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Google is Founded

9/7/1998

On September 7, 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in Mountain View, California. The first Google index included 26,000,000 web pages.

Page and Brin described the technology in a paper entitled  "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30 (1998) 107-117. This paper contains much of great interest historically, including the following statistics:

"Search engine technology has had to scale dramatically to keep up with the growth of the web. In 1994, one of the first web search engines, the World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) [McBryan 94] had an index of 110,000 web pages and web accessible documents. As of November, 1997, the top search engines claim to index from 2 million (WebCrawler) to 100 million web documents (from Search Engine Watch). It is foreseeable that by the year 2000, a comprehensive index of the Web will contain over a billion documents. At the same time, the number of queries search engines handle has grown incredibly too. In March and April 1994, the World Wide Web Worm received an average of about 1500 queries per day. In November 1997, Altavista claimed it handled roughly 20 million queries per day. With the increasing number of users on the web, and automated systems which query search engines, it is likely that top search engines will handle hundreds of millions of queries per day by the year 2000. The goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers."

 

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