Google Then and Now....

The company incorporated on Sept. 4, 1998. Here’s a look at the company - founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two kids from Stanford - then and now.

Source: www.bizjournals.com

Office space

1998: Susan Wojcicki’s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.

Today: At its Mountain View headquarters, Google owns 3.5 million square feet of office space and 7 acres of developable land; it leases 3.8 million square feet and 61 acres of undeveloped land. Around the world, the company owns 2.3 million square feet of office in New York, 665,000 square feet in Paris, France and Dublin, and several data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. It leases additional space around the world.

Employees

1998: In September, Larry and Sergey hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein.

Today: As of June, the company had 44,777 full time employees.

Cash

1998: A $100,000 check from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim

Today: $50 billion as of Dec. 31, 2012

Infrastructure

1998: When it first launched, Google was running mostly on old, donated hardware from IBM, Intel and Sun. A page archived by The Wayback Machine describes the original system used to run Google when it was a research project at Stanford: a Sun Ultra II with dual 200MHz processors and 256MB of RAM. Originally, Google's index was small enough to fit on six 4-gigabyte hard drives.

Today: Google uses its own proprietary hardware in its own proprietary data centers, and its network infrastructure is one of its most closely guarded trade secrets. Its goal is not just performance, but the most performance per dollar spent possible. It's hard to gauge just how big this is, but experts have put the total computing power of the Google network at between 40 and 100 petaflops, roughly 4 to 8 times as much as the world's most powerful supercomputer. Google's network infrastructure is extensive enough that it counts as the world's third-largest internet service provider. Check out an inside look at Google's datacenters, here.

Doodles

1998: Google ran its first Doodle commemorating Burning Man, which founders Larry Pageand Sergey Brin were attending, before it had even incorporated. That doodle was a stick figure of the man, and was intended as a humorous way to say that Page and Brin were out of the office. It looked like this.

Today: Google has a team of designers and engineers who do nothing but design the doodles, and it has expanded beyond just artwork to include video, sound and even interactive games, like this recent one honoring the Roswell landing.

Look and feel

1998: Google.com featured a plain white homepage with its colorful logo, a search bar, the I'm feeling lucky button, and a link to pages with info about the company (see slideshow).

Today: Actually, some things haven't changed. The Google homepage is still very minimalist and still features the same elements. The big change is the Google+ bar on the top, with links to all the other services beside search. Click through the pictures to the right to see a comparison of Google's pages then and now.

Source: www.bizjournals.com