Google reigns as the world's most powerful 10-year-old

Success was hardly assured for two Stanford University graduate students and their nascent search engine, operated from a couple of cramped dorm rooms and burdened with a goofy name.

But their brainchild, Google, incorporated 10 years ago, has blossomed into one of the world's most valuable businesses -- simultaneously sparking fear and admiration in competitors while making information infinitely more accessible to hundreds of millions of people. Few companies have left such an indelible mark in such a relatively short period of time.

"It's pretty amazing to look back on that," said Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google as a company in 1998 with Larry Page. "Obviously, we've been really lucky. It's a story about how the Internet, with its wide availability and international reach, really allows a company to flourish in just a little time."

But can the Mountain View, Calif., online Goliath continue its winning streak for another 10 years? Unlike during its infancy, it now has a target on its back along with a sizable work force -- 19,604 around the globe -- that makes being nimble difficult.

Brin and Page, both 35, formally established Google by incorporating it with the state of California on Sept. 7, 1998. Their goal was to create a better search engine than the likes of AltaVista, which dominated the industry at the time but often failed to return relevant results.

The seed of Google had been planted two years earlier, when its founders, both seeking doctorates in computer science, paired up on an academic project. Those studies eventually would spawn Google's search algorithm, known as PageRank.

Their breakthrough was finding a reliable way to determine relevancy by counting the number of links to a Web site from other Web sites. The more important the site, the more links it would have.

To test their theories, Google's founders created a search engine that they made available to fellow Stanford students and faculty members. Buoyed by its growth in popularity, they took a leave of absence from their studies to work full time on their new company, with the help of $1 million in funding from friends, family and angel investors. It turned out to be a wise decision.

With patience, they -- along with CEO Eric Schmidt, who was hired in 2001 to provide what some called adult supervision -- propelled Google to become the globe's most popular search engine with a market share of 78.4 percent, according to comScore qSearch. In the United States, the company has a 61.9 percent share, three times greater than its nearest rival, Yahoo Inc.

Not satisfied with dominating search, Google has branched out into all sorts of other products including e-mail, instant messaging, online video through the acquisition of YouTube, word processing and spreadsheets. Tuesday it introduced an Internet browser, Chrome.

Underwriting Google's ambitions is online advertising. A financial powerhouse, the company had a $4.85 billion profit during the past four quarters on $19.6 billion in revenue.

Maintaining its torrid pace over the next decade isn't a given for Google, in such a rapidly evolving industry where challengers are looking to pick off a chunk for themselves.

If any company can dent Google, it's software titan Microsoft Corp., which shares many of the online ambitions of its younger rival. Over the years, the two have increasingly butted heads over not only the Internet, but the desktop software market that Microsoft had cornered for more than two decades.

"They are at war with Microsoft, quite literally," said Geoffrey Bowker, executive director of the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University.

Then there's the emergence of new technologies that Google has to keep up with. Failing to appeal to the growing number of people who access the Web from their mobile phones could be catastrophic, for instance.

But Bowker, like many who closely follow the Internet industry, puts high odds on Google being around in 10 years, saying that it is better positioned than Microsoft to succeed online. Startups will have an even tougher time, he insisted, given the billions of dollars in infrastructure required to compete.

Google's early trajectory took it through the Internet downturn in 2000 as a private company, without the headache of Wall Street investors. While other dot-coms were in bunker mode, Google grew frantically, propelled by word of mouth.

Google's official entry into the big time came in 2004 with its high-profile initial public offering. In just over three years, the initial share price of $85 soared to $741.79, before retreating to close at $444.25 Friday.

Underscoring Google's lofty perch is its market valuation of $139.69 billion, exceeding that of The Boeing Co., McDonalds Corp. and FedEx Corp. combined. The wealth machine also has sent Google's founders into the realm of the world's richest, with Forbes estimating that each is worth more than $18 billion.

Barry Wellman, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who studies the impact of the Internet on culture, sees Google's transformation of everyday life to be as significant as its financial footprint.

"Google has had a huge impact on the world," Wellman said. "What it's done is to put information at your fingertips and made us less reliant on experts."

But Google comes with downsides, as even some of its supporters acknowledge.

User behavior is tracked in minute detail on the site, creating a raft of privacy concerns. Nor did Google win many friends by introducing a search engine in China that censors results that run afoul of the party line.

Page, the co-founder, expressed surprise that the 10 years had gone by so quickly. Still, despite Google's accomplishments, he said the job -- encapsulated in the company's goal of organizing all the world's information -- is not over.

"I still think there's a lot to do."