Industry Background Search engine companies haven’t been around for very long with most of them coming into existence in the mid 1990’s. Many of these companies are already gone or in a state of gobbling each other up to compete with the bigger companies. Yahoo seems to be the grandfather of the currently existing crop starting in 1994. The growth in Internet usage and the amount of data being made available has made accurately and quickly finding that data more important. The search companies and search engine strategies have become very important to webmasters and company marketing strategies due to the desire of companies to have their products and services appear at the top of the list and on the most used search sites. The methodologies that a company uses for searching is highly confidential. Some search companies get its search crawler data from Google, for instance Yahoo did this for a while and now AOLSearch is “enhanced” by Google. The companies earn their money in a variety of ways but primarily it is paid advertising that is the bread and butter of this industry. Google, Inc. Background Google Inc. has gone from literally a garage company started in 1998 by two Stanford University computer science graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to a forward thinking firm that employs over 10,000 people today. The two actually met in 1995 and began formulating their initial ideas on searching which they tried to sell. When no interest was garnered for it, they decided to form Google and presented their search methods at a World Wide Web conference in 1998 and by 1999 had $30 million in funding from a variety of means. Google went public in 2004 raising $1.6 billion. Google is so “big” it has become a new word in the English language meaning; to search for information on the Internet, esp. using the…