Google

Google
Google Inc. is an internationally renown Internet search engine and advertisement corporation. Google was founded on September 4th, 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Computer Science graduate students from Stanford University. In 1996, Larry and Sergey had first developed a search engine called BackRub, which ran on the Stanford servers for a little over a year, until it had to be removed due the high amount of bandwidth usage. In 1997, the men switched servers and renamed their project Google, a play on the term "googol", which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zero's. They chose this term because it reflected their mission to organize the abundance of information on the internet. The mission statement of the Google corporation is, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.[[2]

Products
Though known mainly for its Internet search engine, Google runs many specific search engines and various services. These include: Google News, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Google Blog Search, Google Base, Google Video, Google Universal Search and Google Maps.

Tools
One vastly popular service provided by Google is Gmail. Gmail is a free webmail service. The program started as a pet project for developer Paul Buchheit and was intended for Google employees. After showing great promise, it opened up to 1000 beta users in March of 2004. Despite much speculation, Gmail caught on strongly due to its easy to use "conversation" interface, spam filtering, and seemingly limitless storage.