Next month, for the first time since 2001, Eric Schmidt won’t have an executive position at Google or one of its affiliated companies.
On Thursday afternoon, Schmidt announced he’ll be stepping down from his position as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. He won’t be leaving Alphabet entirely — he’ll remain on its board and will serve as a technical advisor role — but he’ll be taking a step back from having a leading role.
Schmidt wasn’t a Google founder, but he joined the company early and played a major role in turning it into a global superpower. The company’s Google.com website is the most-visited in the world, and the company also makes Android, the world’s most popular operating system. And on the back of Google’s incredibly profitable advertising business, Alphabet is now worth $ 743 billion.
But Google’s start was much more modest.
Here’s a look at the company’s history, from its roots in a pair of Stanford dorm rooms, to Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s attempt to sell the company, to the formation of Alphabet, all the way through to Schmidt’s resignation announcement.
Google got its start in 1996 — but it wasn’t called that at first.
The company originated with an idea formulated by Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page, who were both Stanford PhD students at the time. They came up with BackRub, a revolutionary search engine that would rank web pages based on how many other web pages linked back to them, a process they called PageRank.
Page and Brin soon changed their search engine’s name from BackRub to Google.
The BackRub name didn’t last long. They quickly decided that a “googol” — the number one with a hundred zeroes after it — better reflected the amount of data they were trying to sift through. Playing on that word, Page and Brin, whose Stanford dorm rooms comprised their first offices, chose the slightly friendlier name Google for their nascent search engine and company.
The first-ever Google server was built in a custom case made out of Legos.
The server was housed on the Stanford campus and its web address was initially google.stanford.edu. But Brin and Page registered the Google.com domain name on September 15th, 1997.
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