Google is a world-famous company, with its headquarters in Mountain View,
California. It was set up in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998, and inflated
with the Internet bubble. Even when everything around it collapsed the
company kept on inflating. Google’s search engine is so widespread across
the world that search became Google, and google became a verb. The world
fell in love with effective, fascinatingly fast technology.

Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of S.Brin and L.Page, but
also to a series of fortunate events. It was Page who, at Stanford in 1996,
initiated the academic project that eventually became Google’s search
engine. Brin, who had met Page at a student orientation a year earlier,
joined the project early on. They were both Ph.D, candidates when they
devised the search engine which was better than the rest and, without any
marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your
grandmother.

Their breakthrough, simply put, was that when their search engine crawled
the Web. It did more than just look for word matches; it also tallied and
ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one
another. That delivered far better results than anything else. Brin and Page
meant to name their creation Googol(the mathematical term for the number 1
followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as
Google. They raised money from prescient professors and venture capitalists,
and moved off campus to turn Google into a business. Perhaps their biggest
stroke of luck came early on when they tried to sell their technology to
other search engines, but no one met their price, and they built it up on
their own.

The next breakthrough came in 2000, when Google figured out how to make
money with its invention. It had lots of users, but almost no one was
paying. The solution turned out to be advertising, and it’s not an
exaggeration to say that Google is now essentially an advertising company,
given that that’s the source of nearly all its revenue. Today it is a giant
advertising company, worth $100 billion.

Questions (选项略)
1) Apart from a series of fortunate events, what is it that has made Google
so successful?
2) Google’s search engine originated from ___________ started by L.Page.
3) How did Google’s search engine spread all over the world?
4) Brin and Page decided to set up their own business because no one would
________.
5) The revenue of the Google company is largely generated from ________.