Beginnings – Google has its origins in “BackRub”, a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California, The project initially involved an unofficial “third founder”, Scott Hassan, the lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company; Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.
In the search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering among other things exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph, His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as “the best advice I ever got” ) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).
Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page’s ideas. The research project was nicknamed “BackRub”, and it was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco.
Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies. Brin and Page were also part of a computer science research team at Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) by large intelligence and military contractors.
Page’s web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page’s own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point. To convert the backlink data that is gathered for a given web page into a measure of importance, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.
While analyzing BackRub’s output which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance, the pair realized that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies and laid the foundation for their search engine.
- The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website.
- It used nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth.
- Some Rough Statistics (from August 29, 1996) Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes,
- BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux.
The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google.
Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996.
Larry Page’s patent for PageRank filed in 1998 includes a citation to Li’s earlier patent. Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu in 2000.
Do Google reviews get removed if reported?
Understand reviews removed by spam detection – Google uses automated spam detection measures to remove reviews that are probably spam. These measures help improve people’s experiences on Google and ensure the reviews they see are authentic, relevant, and useful. Some legitimate reviews may be inadvertently removed. : Remove reviews from your Business Profile on Google
How long does it take Google to take down a reported review?
The review process can take a few business days, so be patient. If Google finds that the review violates their policies, the review will be deleted within three days.
How many reports on a Google review to get it taken down?
How long does it take for Google to remove a review? H ow long does it take for Google to remove a review? It can take several days for Google to remove a review that has been flagged as inappropriate. However, if Google doesn’t remove a review after you have flagged it, you can still take additional steps to get the review removed. 
Check out our guide on for more detailed, step-by-step instructions, including what to do if Google simply will not remove a negative review you think is inappropriate. Or keep reading here for the highlights.
- The key to removing a Google review is to show Google that the review violates,
- You begin that process by flagging a review for removal.
- How do I flag a Google review for removal? To flag a Google review for removal:
- Log into Google My Business
- Click “Reviews” to view your reviews
- Click the 3-dot menu for the review you want to remove
- Click “Flag as inappropriate”
How many flags does it take to remove a Google review? It only takes 1 flag to remove a Google review as long as you give Google enough evidence that the review violates Google’s policies. Google removes reviews based on whether they violate policy, not based on the number of times a review gets flagged as inappropriate.
If Google still hasn’t removed the review a week or so after you’ve flagged it as inappropriate, escalate the matter to Google’s support team. Make sure you tell the support team the specific language in the review that violates a policy, and which specific policy it violates. This will significantly improve your chances of getting the Google review removed.
It may take Google support up to 24 hours to respond, so be patient. If Google’s support team refuses the remove the review, don’t despair. All is not lost. You still have a few options left. First, if you think the reviewer violated the law in some way (such as committing libel or copyright infringement) then you can still get the review removed if you engage a lawyer.
Google is very good about removing any content that a judge has officially ruled against. Of course lawyers can get pretty expensive. So if you don’t want to pay for legal help, you still have one more arrow in your quiver: You can try to minimize the damage of the review by to it. First see if you can reach out to the customer to solve their problems.
Then after improving the customer’s experience, ask if they’ll update their review (presumably to a kinder, gentler review with an extra star or two added). If you can’t improve the customer’s experience, then your final fallback is to respond to the review in a way that shows all future customers how well you behave in a crisis.
Write a response that demonstrates that you’re sympathetic to your customers’ needs and that you go above and beyond to help your customers when they’re dissatisfied. You may not win over the reviewer, but you may win over dozens or even hundreds of future prospects who read your response to the reviewer.
The one last thing you can do to handle a negative review is to drown out bad reviews with good reviews. To do this, check out the chapter on the in our ultimate guide to Google reviews. Rising star reviews has the best for your business. Use our Free trial and manage your business reviews smoothly.
Can a bad Google review be traced?
Can Google reviews be traced? – Yes. Your IP address can be traced if you leave a Google review anonymously. Google can see your IP address when you post a review, even if you hide your name.
How do I bury a bad Google review?
Ask Google if they can remove the review – Most business owners feel the negative reviews they get are undeserved and are desperate to get them removed. The good news is, Google does provide a tool you can use to request the removal of a particular review. 
All you need to do is log in to the Google account associated with your Google listing, click on the request review removal button then confirm your account details and your listing. Choose the “Report a new review for removal” option then select the review you want to report. 
You’ll then have to choose a reason why you think this review should be removed. Once submitted Google will look at it and let you know if the review has been removed, or not. The bad news is, in most cases, your request will be turned down, Unless it fits the exact criteria of one of the categories listed the review won’t be removed. 
So unless you receive tons of reviews, it’s likely to stay there for some time and put people off, resulting in a loss of business. But there is a quick hack you can use to quickly bury it further down the list.
What happens when you Flag a Google review as inappropriate?
What is an Inappropriate Google Review to Flag? – When you see something online that doesn’t seem quite right; you may want to report it. The same goes for Google reviews. If you come across an inappropriate review, you can flag it for removal. There are a few things to keep in mind when flagging a review.
- Reviews that contain profanity, sexually explicit, or obscene language
- Promotional reviews
- Reviews that are off-topic or irrelevant
- Reviews that have personal information (e.g., addresses, phone numbers, email addresses)
If the review does not violate any of these guidelines, it is unlikely to be removed. However, you can still flag it and leave a comment explaining why you think it should be removed. Once you have determined that the review violates Google’s guidelines, you can flag it by clicking on the “Flag as inappropriate” link.
How long does it take for Google to process a review?
How long does it take a Google review to post? Google reviews often show within 1-2 hours of being posted on a business profile. Reviews that are pending a manual review can take 3-5 days to publish if they meet Google’s Guidelines.