A followup of the Google blackballing CNet for a year because they published publicly-available information about Google’s CEO Erik Schmidt that they found using *Google*.

The US government has issued its report derived from all the user search histories it subpoena’d earlier this year. Seth Finkelstein says the findings include: “About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website

Google surely comes from humble roots affirms Jeff Atwood on his blog where he posted a picture of some of Google’s first servers, when Google was housed in a Palo Alto garage. These must have been the servers when I first used Google in about 1997/98 (About the same time I started my first Geocities site. )

Google hardware circa 1999.

Via Coding Horror.

Update: A more complete Google time line can be found here.

David Kohler of Stanford university, writes about the origin of the Google name. According to him, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders, began their work on a search engine called Backrub in 1996. By 1997, they began looking for a name for their new service. The names “googol” and “googolplex” were suggested. Sean Anderson, a friend of Larry’s, ran a search to see if the name was available, but like many of us was not an inffalible speller and searched for google.com, which was available. Within hours, Larry had secured the domain name (whois records date to September 15, 1997), and the rest is history.

The text is cached here against the dissapearance of the original source.

Mirrored from:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

Origin of the name “Google”
From time to time I read or hear stories of the origin of the search engine and company name “Google” that are incorrect, which prompts me to write this brief account, based on my understanding of the genesis of the name. The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine “BackRub,” named for its analysis of the of the web’s “back links.” Larry’s office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year.

Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).

David Koller (dk@cs.stanford.edu), January, 2004

The WaybackMachine spiders and stores most of the sites on the internet, giving you an interesting historical view of the intenet and its development and evolution over time. A search for Google on the WaybackMachine takes us back to December of 1998 and a definite 90’s look for Google. Have a look; if you’re like me, this will bring back memories of your college years when Google was first discovered.Some interesting pages are December 2, 1998 and a cleaner look in 1999.