businessbriefs
Topic

Information

A physical quantity, once someone thought to measure it.

1
in business
8:28
average
8 min
in total
34
across the network
Information across the network →
Refine21
Desks
Company stories 27Rise & fall 53Founders 28Deals & IPOs 19Scandals 23Strategy 139Management 15Marketing 5Finance 57Startups & venture 53Product 28
Verdict
Worth your time 553Worth skipping 8
Topics
Infrastructure 123Supply chains 96Energy 72Banking 63Retail 62Globalisation 49Markets 48Engineering 47All 171 topics →
All briefs1
8:28

Google

Larry Page & Sergey Brin · 1998

Google is a search engine company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its core technology, PageRank, ranked websites by inbound links — a method co-published with Motwani and Winograd and patented by Stanford. Scott Hassan wrote the first implementation. The company launched from Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Its name misspelled 'googol' to signal scale. Initial funding came from Andy Bechtolsheim’s $100,000 cheque in August 1998. The sources say nothing about advertising, revenue, users, infrastructure costs, or market position beyond this.

More from business

All briefs →
9:02

BHP

BHP is an Australian mining company, founded at Broken Hill in 1885, that today mines iron ore, copper and coal.
9:33

Gabe Newell

Gabe Newell left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve, the game company whose Steam service came to carry most of its revenue.
8:14

Ray Kroc

Ray Kroc was the American businessman who bought McDonald's in 1961 and helped turn it into a worldwide franchise chain.
10:16

Jumbo

Jumbo is a Dutch supermarket chain, owned by the Van Eerd Group, that grew from one store in a former church in Tilburg into the second largest in the Netherlands.