Search Engine Optimization

This is a picture of a $200 billion server. Does not look too advanced, but it started the fastest and the most successful company in the new millennium.

Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM, according to Wikipedia.

This is the same machine, reminding of the first roots. I bet Google could sell it for at least a million dollars =). Google’s first spider crawled pages at the rate of 100 per second, with six different browsers simultaneously.

As time went by and Larry and Sergey put their Phds. on hold and dedicated themselves to the growth of their genius. They maxed out their credit cards and bought more hardware to build their first server farm.

Google got it’s first major investment from Andy Bechtolsheim one of the founders of Sun Microsystems in 1998, who wrote them a check for $100.000 after quickly viewing a demo. From that point on Google Inc. was formed, Larry and Sergey were on the roll. Company quickly grew starting to attract new investments, contracts and audience all across the country. Two years later Google signed an agreement with Yahoo! to provide search results and by 2001, according to SearchEngineWatch had received $7.1 million for the search queries it handled. Yahoo! did not pursue further contacts, when it was clear Google was becoming a big challenge for the company.

As of today, it is speculated that Google is valued at over $200 billion dollars, employing 15,916 full-time staff (September 30, 2007) , maintaining 450,000 servers, continuing to grow at the speed of light.

You can see more pictures of the very first Google servers and explore a virtual Google museum.