Google

The book I read to research this post was The Google Story by David A Vise which is an excellent book which I bought from a car boot sale. In 1996 Sergey Brin & Larry Page developed a piece of software called Pagerank which as a bit of a joke they named after Larry. It was a much more intelligent search engine than what companies like Yahoo were using at that time. It's algorithms are a closely guarded secret but what we do know is it looks at the context of words on a webpage & if a word is used as a tag it checks to see if that word appears on the page. Believe me the world was crying out for something like this as some of the tricks webmasters were doing like repeatedly using a word on a page were getting them top position on search results. Anyway Larry & Sergey approached Yahoo & Altavista with their creation but their attitude was if it ain't broke why fix it. So Larry & Sergey got some venture capital & started their own company called Google. They apparently wanted to call it Googol which is the unit name of a 1 followed by 100 zero's. That again was their sense of humour because pagerank indexes loads of pages. Anyway they settled on Google. It's interesting that they don't allow adverts on their homepage depriving themselves of tens of millions of dollars of revenue. Google has over 200,000 computers many of them daisy chained into multiple units. That makes Googles computer network the biggest of any company in the world. They concentrate on making their search engine the fastest to respond. Also Google builds its own servers. As well as being a search engine Google has its fingers in many pies. Among them it's a software company & among its products is Google Docs which is free to use for home users. They give you your own website to store your work. There is also an online book repository at
http://print.google.com
There are many scanned books at this site.
There is also a site where you can explore the moon at
http://moon.google.com
Finally their advertising programme which takes the form of adwords & adsense is particularly accessible to small businesses because you can limit how much you spend per day on it. You can pay them per customer or per visitor to your site.