Alphabet Inc.: Reorganizing Google

Google’s roots lay in a research project on search engines taken up by two PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page (Page) and Sergey Brin (Brin), in 1996. Google pioneered a new technology called ‘PageRank’, which determined the importance of the website by the number of other pages linked to it and their importance that linked back to the original site. This new technology marked a shift from the earlier method followed by other search engines which ranked the results by the number of times the search terms appeared on the page. The search engine was initially called ‘BackRub’ as it determined a website’s relevance by checking its back links. The name was finally changed to Google, based on the word ‘Googol’ – the number one followed by a hundred zeroes...