Exam practice question THE GOOGLE PHENOMENON In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University. The following year they formed a partnership and began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. In 1997, they decided to rename BackRub and came up with Google (derived from googol". a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros). With $100 000 support from a backer, Google Inc. was set up in 1998 in a garage in California. Later that year, PC Magazine recognised Google's search engine as one of the top 100 websites. In 2000, Google became available in many languages including French, German, Italian and Chinese. By 2004, the Google search index contained six billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images. It moved to an office in California called Googleplex with more than 800 employees and offices all over the world. In the same year, Google became a public limited company offering for sale 19605 052 shares at an opening price of $85 a share. Over the next five years, Google refined and added to its search engines a range of products such as Google News, Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Video. Today, Google is a huge multinational corporation worth around 5160 billion and its share price is over $500 a share 1. Define the term "partnership'. [2] 2. Outline two possible benefits to Larry Page and Sergey Brin of starting Google as a partnership. [4] 3. Analyse two possible problems Larry Page and Sergey Brin might encounter by starting Google as a partnership. [4] 4. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages to Google of its conversion to a public limited company in 2004. [10]