We all know and love Google, but not a lot of us know how Google operates. That’s for a good reason; a magician would never reveal his best magic trick. It’ll stop being magic. What started out as just a simple search engine, turned into a multibillion dollar corporation. How did they become the brilliant company they are today?

In 1996, the two founders of Google, Larry and Sergey, started working on a search engine called BackRub. It operated on Stanford’s servers, until Stanford eventually kicked them out. Let’s face it, the term “BackRub it” would never have worked out. So, our two founders of Google registered the domain (Google.com) in 1997. Google was actually a misspelling of googol, which is defined as 1 with a hundred zeros after it. Several years later, we now have a website with multilanguage support, Google Images, an international office in Tokyo, Google News, Froogle (now known as Google Shopping), and Google Print (now known as Google Books).

Google has indeed grown immensely in just 5-7 years. A few more years go by, and now we have Gmail, Google Scholar, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google Finance, Google Translate, Google Trends, and they purchased YouTube!  We’re still only at the end of 2006, and there’s a lot more to cover! Google continued to make their programs better.  They made Street View a part of Google Maps, and they made the first open platform for mobile devices, Android. Now, Google is going beyond just a simple search engine, not only do they have all of these neat things, they now have their own browser. More and more onto recent years, we now have Google Glass, Google Drive, and Google+. Google is slowly taking over the world, now that we have Google Loon (which deserves an entire article by itself)

We talked a lot about the things Google has to offer, but let’s talk about the hardware. Back at the days of BackRub, Google’s main machine had dual 200 MHz, and 256 MB of ram. Here’s a comparison. Your smart phone is at least 5 times as fast as that machine. But, since it was a server rack, there were other computers. The entire system had 261 GBs of storage with a combined RAM of 1.25 GBs, and at most, could get 3 GigaFLOPS. It would probably be much less than 1 GigaFLOPS, but I’m giving Google the benefit of the doubt and saying they have the same processors types as today. Let’s give you another comparison. You can buy a laptop from Toshiba that has almost 5 times as much RAM, almost 2 times as much storage, with a 20 GigaFLOPS processor for $300. Today, nobody really knows how powerful Google’s computers are, but people have estimated that it’s at least 40 PetaFLOPS. Back to our Toshiba laptop example, Google’s computers are about 2,097,152 times faster than the $300 laptop. Google has indeed grown. And remember, my friends, stay classy.