Stories within the story

Google's growth was very much deserved and mostly based on their search engine. However, there are a myriad of stories about their other products that are often overlooked. Discover the stories of fourteen products that shaped Google's success.

From the development of Gmail to the launch of Google Maps, these stories highlight the innovation and impact of Google's products. Through captivating narratives and behind-the-scenes anecdotes, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the company's journey and the people behind its success.

Google had a Third Prospective Founder

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Google had a third founder? It's hard to say for sure. Maybe Google would have had a different name, or perhaps it would have been sold in 2000. One thing we do know is that there was a potential third founder. But before we dive into this, let's take a moment to consider what that founder missed out on.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the only two who own the majority of the company. As of today, their stock alone is worth 100's of billions of dollars combined. But actually, there was to be a potential third founder, and his name was Scott Hassan.In 1996, Sergey and Larry worked at Stanford on a project called BackRub. There was initially an unofficial founder called Scott Hassan.

He was the lead programmer and wrote most of the original code for the Google search engine. He left before Google could be founded as a company. Larry initially considered a dissertation topic exploring the connection between mathematics and the World Wide Web. He envisioned it as a vast graph. After discussing the idea with his advisor, Terry Winograd, who was enthusiastic about it, Terry encouraged him to pursue the topic further. Page later reflected on this advice as "The best advice I ever got."

Larry's thesis needs to be completed, focusing on two dynamics: the World Wide Web and understanding its link structure as a huge graph. The challenge is to link a page to other online web pages and determine why it is an excellent page to bring up for a search query. While academic papers use citations to link to written works, the online world lacks this measure. Larry discussed his dilemma with Hassan, who helped him create the code gradually.

Sergey, who was working on his Ph.D. degree, joined the team. This project became known as "BackRub," a name that will be discussed later in this chapter.

By March 1996, Page had a web crawler, which was the starting point for him to convert backlink data and use it later down the line. Then to make sense of the results, the PageRank algorithm was created. Larry Page would say that Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg, also a computer engineer from Stanford, were pivotal to the creation of BackRub and Google's success. That's always interesting to see how founders honor the work of previous individuals who helped build Google. Usually, those in the early stages know the struggles that occurred along the way.

Scott Hassan programmed the original Google search engine, then known as BackRub. At the time, he was a research assistant at Stanford University. But he left Google before it was founded as a company. In 1998 Scott bought 160,000 Google shares for $800, worth $13 billion today. Even though he did not continue with Google, he developed more projects. One included FindMail, later named eGroups.com, which was an email management site. Yahoo eventually purchased that for $432 million and renamed it Yahoo Groups. His last noted business venture was with a robotics research lab called Willow Garage for robotics software, which closed in early 2014.

Going from BackRub and coding the first iteration of the Google search engine is not easy. It is impressive that he helped build a search engine that is still the most popular today. Although he is not the third member of the founder group of Google, He performed well with his Google shares and the Yahoo acquisition of his company. While Google did not have a third founder, it was interesting to see how BackRub did play a role in the company. Every product has to start somewhere.