Knowledge Learning at Google

History

Google, Inc. began its life cycle as a research project for Larry Paige and Sergey Brin, while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University (Battelle 2007). By January of 1996, Paige and Brin started a working together on a search engine called BackRub. Like many graduate students with a shortage of money, the pair used low cost PCs that were "borrowed" from the department's loading docks (Corporate Information n.d.). The two's reputation grew exponentially from that point forward and they continued to work on the system.

Using a dorm room as the first data center, both men started trying to locate potential partners. There seemed to be very little interest in the technology that they were presenting as Google. Many investors thought there was not much potential because of the lack of customer interest. Paige and Brin decided to move forward with their idea. They wrote a business plan which was then presented to a faculty member and a founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim who invested $100,000 in Google Inc. (Corporate Information n.d.). Since there was no such corporation, the check could not be used at that point. Google Inc. was incorporated on September 7, 1998, with the help of family, friends and others who invested in their idea with an initial investment of almost $1 million (Corporate Information n.d.).

Once the company went public as Google.com, it moved from answering 10, 000 queries to more than 500,000 queries and the number of employees were growing so much that a new office was needed. With a $25 million investment from two capital firms in Silicon Valley, new growth was imminent. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested in the firm and both took seats on the board of Google Inc (Corporate Information n.d.). The crowded situation was alleviated when Google moved into its new office known as the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Google continued to grow and attract new users. When AOL/Netscape chose Google to be their web search service, the number of queries grew past the 3 million per day (Corporate Information n.d.). Up until this point, Google was considered a beta. On September 21, 1999, Google was no longer considered a beta. Google and Yahoo! announced their partnership on June 26, 2000 (Corporate Information n.d.). This partnership increased the promise of Google's reputation. Queries were now surpassing 18 million per day. Google moved into the global market with partnerships with China's NetEase and Japan's BIGLOBE (Corporate Information n.d.).

Google continues to grow and make changes to the search engine. New partnerships and collaborations continue to be formed in order to create a system that is completely universal. The organization has grown from 2 employees to 13,748 full-time employees as of June 30, 2007, and is continuing expand today (Google n.d.).

Business Strategy

Google's mission statement is as follows: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (Company Overview n.d.). In an attempt to reach the goals of the company within this mission, Google created a Strategy and Business Operations team. The team's job is to think both strategically and globally about entire industries while defining business initiatives that contribute to company growth (Google Jobs n.d.). The team consists of creative visionaries who enjoy "deconstructing and re-creating businesses to meet changing strategic and operational needs, enable innovation, establish more efficient business practices and help the company continue to achieve its vast potential" (Google Jobs n.d.). Google works hard to develop and implement products that are considered next generation,