Bookstore Glossary Library Links News Publications Timeline Virtual Israel Experience
Anti-Semitism Biography History Holocaust Israel Israel Education Myths & Facts Politics Religion Travel US & Israel Vital Stats Women
donate subscribe Contact About Home

Companies Founded by Jews in America: Google

Google Inc. is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search and advertising technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.

The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys," while the two were computer science graduate students at Stanford University. According to industry lore, Brin and Page argued often, though the sparring soon ended when they began developing a new kind of Internet search engine from their college dormitory. They called their program BackRub for its ability to analyze "back links," the pointers from one Web site to another. They developed the theory that a search engine based on a mathematical analysis of the relationships between Web sites would produce better results than the basic techniques then in use. BackRub allowed the search engine to list results according to the popularity of the pages, after Brin and Page realized that more times than not the most popular result would also be the most useful. They worked on BackRub until mid-1998, and then sought to sell licenses to the technology. Their immediate goal was to move out of the dormitory and pay off the credit card debt they had amassed. Andy Bechtolsheim, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, was immediately enthusiastic about the technology, which Brin and Page called Googol, for the amount of information the search engine would be able to search. Googol is a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. At their first meeting, Bechtolsheim did not need to hear too many details; he wrote a check for $100,000, Brin said. The check was made out to Google, Inc., essentially forcing the two young men to set up a corporation, if only to cash the check, with a slightly different spelling from their original name.

Ultimately, Brin and Page raised $1 million from family, friends, and other investors, and on Sept. 7, 1998, Google was commercially launched from a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Initially, Google got 10,000 queries a day. By 2004, the number was 200 million a day.

Operating out of a 500,000 sq. ft. headquarters in Mountain View, California, affectionately known as the GooglePlex, the company in 2004 had almost 2,000 employees. According to forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Brin and Page owned more than 38 million shares of Google stock, or roughly 40 percent of the company. When Google went public in 2004, it was estimated that the company had a value of $23 billion, and each founder was worth many billions of dollars. Many employees, whose perks at the work-place include washing machines, doctor visits at company offices, roller hockey, table tennis, pool, a staff masseuse, and free meals and snacks, became millionaires.

Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every day. Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond the company's core search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail e-mail software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. More notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile phone operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Nexus One and Motorola Droid.

Google's first office in Israel opened in 2006, when the company was just five years old. Since then they have expanded; with 600 engineers in the country as of October 2016 and a large dedicated start-up “campus” in Tel Aviv. Google has purchased five Israeli companies, most notably paying over $1 billion for Israeli-developed GPS application Waze.

Don Dodge, Google developer partner advocate, stated to Business Insider magazine that he has been to “every corner of the earth... [and] there is no other country on earth that thinks the same way that we [Google] do like Israel does.” Half of Google's Israeli engineers are graduates of the Tel Aviv University, and Dodge argues “there's an amazing source of talent here.” He added, “Israel truly is the ‘Startup Nation.’ You think like us. You break things, you make things, you’re creative. It’s special.”

In April 2021, Google officially announced it would set up local cloud infrastructure in Israel. Once completed, the local Google cloud is expected to improve cloud services for the local startup industry which the state believes will benefit substantially from the move. Along with Amazon, Google will set up and operate Israel’s Project Nimbus, which involves construction of local cloud server centers.


Source: Shead, Sam. “Execs from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft explain why they use Israel for their R&D,” Business Insider (October 6, 2016).
Encyclopaedia Judaica.
Google.
Wikipedia.