Google Explained:

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Google is a very large and popular search engine on the World Wide Web of the Internet . Other search engines (for example, AOL ) use its software and database too. That makes it the most-used search engine on the web. Every day, 200 million people use it. Google's main office ("Googleplex") is in Mountain View, California, USA.

With Google, people can also search for pictures, Usenet newsgroups, news, and things to buy online. By June 2004 , Google indexed (or put in its database) 4.28 billion webpages, 880 million pictures and 845 million Usenet messages - six billion things.

"To google," as a verb means "to search for something on Google"; because Google is so popular (perhaps 80 percent of all web users work with it) today it also means "to search the web." Google officials do not like this use of the company name, because really, "Google" is a trademark.

Google began as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Leland Stanford University , USA. They made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7 , 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999 , the company went to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California. Then, later that year, it went to the "Googleplex".

In September 2001, Google's ranking system ("PageRank", for saying which information is more helpful) got a U.S. Patent. The patent was to Leland Stanford University, with Lawrence Page as the inventor (the person who first had the idea).

The name "Google" is a play on the word googol. Milton Sirotta , nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this word in 1938, for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It is said that the word "googol" was chosen to represent this number because it sounded like baby talk. Google uses this word because the company wants to organize a very big quantity of information on the Web. Andy Bechtolsheim first thought of the name.

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