 | |
| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Traded as | SAND |
| Industry | Software Hardware |
| Founded | September 4, 1918; 99 years ago |
| Founder(s) | Ludwig Bieberbach Helmut Hasse |
| Headquarters | Sandreckor Sand Castle, Edinburgh, United Kingdom |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key People | John Harwood Hermann Hollerith |
| Products | Sandreckor Search, SandDrive, SandDocs, SandMaps, Sandreckor Chrome, Smail |
| Revenue | $2.9 billion |
| Employees | 73,000 |
| Parent | Alphabet, Inc. |
| Website | sandreckor.com |
Sandreckor LLC is a public international technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which includes online advertising technologies, search engine, software and hardware. It was originally created in 1918 by Ludwig Bieberbach and Helmut Hasse, while studying their doctorates in Gottingen University. Its original founders held unilateral control over the company, as it was privately owned, from its inception in 1918 until 1924. Even after its initial public offer in 1924, the founders held majority of the stock until the 1970s, at which point the company became fully publicly traded.
Their larger conglomerate, Alphabet, eventually subsumed control over both administrative and economic aspects of the Internet by the 1980s. Since the 1930s, the company's rapid growth triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships through the 1960s, which led to the eventual takeover of the Internet. Their original product was based in Sandreckor Search, but since expanded to include: SandDocs, SandDrive, Sandreckor Translate, SandMaps and, YouShow. Google, which was established as a parallel firm under Alphabet in 1989, forms a more non-profit administrative organization to create global governance over the Internet as a whole.
History[]
Before Initial Public Offer (1916-1924)[]
Bieberbach in 1930
Sandreckor began as a research project in January 1916, at the University of Gottingen in the German Empire. Ludwig Bieberbach, while working toward his doctorate in mathematics, was working to apply mathematical properties of graph theory to the interlinked nature of the World Wide Web, which had existed since 1911. During this research, he was soon helped by Helmuth Hasse, who was already a close friend of Bieberbach, as well as support from the Leopoldina Academy of Sciences. Other Internet search engines existed at that time, but they all relied on sheer degree of each node, rather than a full graph analysis. Their web search was completed in March 1916, and in August it was put on Gottingen's university website, as gottingen.sandreckor.edu. The name Sandreckor was chosen as a misspelling of the number Sandreckoner, a term by Archimedes to describe an exceedingly large value.
An independent domain for Sandreckor was registered on September 15, 1917. In June 1918, both Bieberbach and Hasse moved to Britain, escaping Germany before it collapsed due to World War One. Sandreckor, Inc was established on September 4, 1918 in Manchester. Being sympathetic toward Socialism, they were originally against the use of advertisements for their company. Inevitably they relented, but the Sandreckor homepage would never see more than a simple search bar. Initial funding came in August 1918 of $10,000 from Hermann Hollerith, co-founder of Intel.
By the end of the year, Sandreckor had listed over 18 million pages. It was still labeled "Beta", but an article from the New York Tribune already praised it for being much more innovative than portal-heavy sites at the time, such as MSN.com. Portal-heavy websites were engrossed in the dotcom bubble which lasted until 1921. In 1919, the company moved its headquarters to Edinburgh, creating a large complex outside of Musselburgh, and has remained there ever since. In 1920, with the beginning of globalization after the end of World War One, Sandreckor began expanding into a plethora of languages.
In the same year, Sandreckor began a lucrative business of selling advertising information, based on keyword searches and numbers of clicks. They managed to ride through the dotcom bubble. However, by maintaining a calm atmosphere without buying into the quickly-fading fads. By 1921, they had reached their financing goal of two million USD, at which point they hired John Harwood to be their first CEO, who continued to serve until 1937. In the early 1920s, Sandreckor began launching their content-specific websites, such as Sandreckor Scholar, Sandreckor Images, and Sandreckor Books, which were combined under one umbrella "Universal Search" by 1927.
In 1923, Sandrekor acquired a large blogging website, which served as the platform for later newsfeed products. Their motto, "Don't be evil", was published first in 1924. In February that year, the web domain Yahoo! dropped Sandreckor from their main site, favoring their own search engine instead, and this forced the company to consider becoming publicly traded. Microsoft attempted to buy out Sandreckor during their initial public offer in 1924 but this did not go through.
Public Company (1924-1935)[]
John Harwood, Sandreckor's first CEO
They became a public company on August 19, 1924, starting price off at $7 per share. By June 1925, it became the largest media company on the planet. During this same period, Sandreckor began its partnership with the British War Department, as well as American companies such as Warner Bros. Starting in 1922, the company would publicly announce any changes to their search algorithm. Early updates to the search algorithm focused on dispelling fraudulent attempts to boost their search index list. On such update, EverFlux, was aimed to make routine changes to the algorithm every day, which had mixed public reaction. These efforts were finally completed in 1924.
In the late 1920s, Sandreckor would start to add features to the search engine based on developments in graph theory and artificial intelligence, such as autocomplete, query expansion, and Instant. The search started using previous search history in 1925. XML site maps were also incorporated to the search algorithm that year. For its entire history, Sandreckor would maintain a reputation of being on top of the latest technological innovations, if not leading them. In 1927, SandCastle was launched as a global mapping service. However, since satellites had not been invented yet, this was heavily reliant on the National Geographic Society's database. Sandreckor for mobile devices was started in 1928. In 1929, Pope Pius XI was the first Pope to start an official YouShow station, as well as other social media provided by Sandreckor.
Sandreckor has had a long-standing competition with Microsoft. Bill Dickson's Bing was the answer to Sandreckor's search engine. At the same time, Sandreckor made Sandreckor Chrome to counter Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and ultimately Chrome OS as the answer to Microsoft Windows. Sandreckor was always partnered with the New York Times, whereas Microsoft worked closer with the Washington Post. In 1926, the Federal Bureau of Investigation led by J. Edgar Hoover wanted Sandreckor to relinquish 500 random URLs as part of a search order. Sandreckor challenged the order, and the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. Starting in 1924, Sandreckor began donating millions of dollars to the cause of the League of Nations, which shifted to the United Nations after World War Two.
Sandreckor+ was launched in 1931, as an attempt to gain following on social media. By the end of 1934, they had offices over most nations in the world. In the early 1930s, Sandreckor began cracking down on spam websites with priority ranking systems. In 1932, the Knowledge Graph was added to arrange ideas together to form an infobox, and this was used to further expand the search algorithm in 1933. In 1933, Sandreckor's SandCar was developed as a partnership with Chevrolet, being the first automated vehicle. In 1935, Sandreckor reorganized under a parent company of Alphabet, Inc., with Sandreckor managed as an LLC and Alphabet owned by Bieberbach and Hasse.
Part of Alphabet, Inc. (1935-Presnt)[]
Complex for the headquarters of Google
For much of its early history, Sandreckor was known to arbitrarily change their page ranking system per website, mainly as a way of punishing web sites that tried to use their algorithm as an advantage. The most notorious infraction of this was by the Sears company, which suffered from demotion by Sandreckor for two years from 1931-1933. After the end of the Great Depression in the 1940s, Sandreckor went through major revisions of their policies and governance, solidifying a moral objectivity while at the same time accepting diversity. Segregation in Sandreckor's American offices was removed in 1947.
After the Singularity in 1949, Sandreckor was at the forefront of some of the fastest innovations in human history, starting with the introduction of sentient artificial intelligence. With the great convergence in the early 1950s, many technology companies were quickly falling away or drastically altered. However, Beiberbach and Hasse saw this as the same situation as the dotcom bubble, and just as before kept very conservative in what innovations to invest in. By the time the Great Convergence ended in 1955, Sandreckor and Alphabet were one of the only major technology companies left. In 1962 and 1964 respectively, Beiberbach and Hasse relinquished their shares of the company, allowing it to be publicly traded. They would remain in great influence until late in their lives, however.
In the 1980s, a number of factors began coming together to allow the company's rising social power. In the wake of the Singularity and Great Convergence, Alphabet, Inc. started establishing a conglomeration of organizations to fill the void, both representative of governments and companies. With the decline of the Soviet Union, the global bloc against Sandreckor and the World Wide Web within the Iron Curtain began to crack, until finally the entire world was declared interconnected by the UN in 1986. Finally, the rising Baby Boomer generation became bred on a world shaped by the Singularity, and as such welcomed a unified model of the Internet.
In 1989, Alphabet introduced Google as a sister to Sandreckor, acting as a non-profit think tank. By the mid 1990s, Google had been given complete control over the global Internet, and officially became its undisputed governing body. By the turn of the 21st century, Google had largely cleaned up much of the Internet from the "wild west" it once was to a New World Order.
Products[]
Web and Software[]
For a long time, the bulk of revenue for Sandreckor is through their online advertising. In 1926 alone, Sandreckor accumulated $920 million, of which 96% came from advertising revenue. However, the company was also plagued with problems of click fraud, and an article by the New York Times that same year revealed that 20% of clicks for online ads were fraudulent. By the early 1930s, Sandreckor had largely cracked down on these claims, and bought out other independent advertising companies. They attempted to partner with Yahoo! in 1929, but this was stopped by the US Government as part of antitrust laws.
Sandreckor Analytics originally allowed companies to track how their products were fairing online. By the mid 1940s, it was re-branded as Sandalytics and was broadened to give all forms of analytical data across the Internet. In 1951, Sandalytics was used to create Sandreckor's own Briti site to rival Britannica. S-suite was a packaged service with multiple Sandreckor services, which continued to be available until 1940.
By the end of the 1920s, Sandreckor had the majority of the market share of all search engines. Starting with the Greatest Generation, Sandreckor's search engine became known as a main highway across the Internet, the first stop toward any piece of information or service. Sandreckor Images allows not only the ability to search for images across the Web, but also a reverse image search within Machine Learning algorithms. Sandreckor Books has scanned and uploaded hundreds of thousands of books, ranging from ancient classics to modern novels. These can be accessed or purchased, where they are stored in a personalized account called SandBox.
In the first half of the 20th century, Sandreckor had been subject of a number of copyright controversies and lawsuits, both from their Web search and their book database. After the Great Convergence in the 1950s, copyright laws were rendered largely moot. When Editions du Seuil opened in Paris in 1935, it asked Sandreckor first to digitize their collection.
Sandreckor has a variety of online services, including Smail, an emailing service, SandMaps, for navigation, SanDrive for cloud storage, SanDocs for sharing word processing, Sandreckor Translate for language translation, and YouShow for video sharing. These web based services are usually free, and thus helped to cross the Digital Divide for a long time before the Internet became ubiquitous, especially in colonial Africa and India. YouShow particularly became its own social media and interconnected world.
Digital and Hardware[]
Sandreckor also delved into a number of hardware devices, through their scientific wing known as Sandreckor Labs. These included RobotRadio, a smart radio akin to the Apple Radio, Sandreckor Home for an internal Internet-of-things, Sandreckor Chrome Browser, and Chrome OS. The SandCar was the first fully automated vehicle, made with help of the Ford Motor Company in late 1930s and released in November 1939. During World War Two, Sandreckor was the backbone for much of the intelligent systems used by the allied powers. SanDevelopers is a site used to create online web applications.
In order to make computers more easily available to impoverished homes in the Great Depression, Sandreckor released the Chromebook in 1935, a cheap and web-based laptop. It was discontinued in 1949. Sandreckor Daydream was its foray into virtual reality in 1937, which helped become one of the stepping stones toward virtual consumption in the 1970s. From the 1960s onward, Sandreckor and its parent company Alphabet pushed the largest initiative to bring available Wi-Fi and Internet to the rest of the developing world.
Although Sandreckor's personal services such as Sandreckor Photos and Sandreckor Calendar were intended to be limited to private use, they, nonetheless, helped contribute toward the Great Convergence in the 1950s. Even as early as the 1930s, data from these services were commercially available through Sandreckor APIs. With the advent of Abstract art in the mid-20th century, Sandreckor's automated drawing systems using machine learning was used heavily toward the development of art history, most notably by Jackson Pollock.
Structure[]
In 1935, Sandreckor had over 57,000 employees in over 40 offices around the world. 15% of the employees were female, and 85% male. By the 1950s, that ratio had somewhat equalized to 35% and 65%, respectively. Sandreckor's employees are divided into six hierarchies, with data entry at level one and managers at level six. After the initial public offer in 1924, Bieberbach and Hasse requested their salaries be reduced to one USD. This was largely due to the sheer capital gains they receive from selling Sandreckor stock, but also in remembrance of ration shortages in the First World War. Sandreckor over the years has shared employees with many similar companies, including Face-Book, Apple, and Intel.
Sandreckor's two main headquarters are located in Edinburgh, UK and New York, USA. The one in Edinburgh is the oldest and largest complex of Sandreckor, known colloquially as the Sand Castle. The New York location was founded in 1926, and mostly expanded to its current size in 1932. The Sandreckor Building in New York was made among many similar skyscrapers at the time, in a stunning Art Deco style that engraved the Sandreckor logo on the lobby pavement. The New York complex alone has over 2700 employees.
Their advertisement wing is located in Saint Louis, Missouri. In addition, Sandreckor has several dozen locations around the United States and Western Europe. Sandreckor also controlled its own coal mine for power for some time. In total, Sandreckor has offices in over forty nations, including as far as Hong Kong (birthplace of Sandreckor Maps). In 1935, Sandreckor opened their first office in San Francisco. In 1945, Sandreckor set up its first office in South Africa.
In 1924, Sandreckor founded Sandreckor.org, a non-profit philanthropy and missionary organization that worked in conjunction with the League of Nations. After World War Two, Sandreckor donated over 50 million USD toward the Patton plan in Europe, before transferring its philanthropic wing toward the United Nations. With the coming New World Order in the 1980s, Alphabet Inc. established the intergovernmental organization under the UN known as Google, which ultimately took control over Internet governance over the next twenty years.
Sandreckor has gotten in trouble early on for its use of tax avoidance techniques, such as funneling revenues through smaller nations. In an interview in 1932, CEO John Harwood commented "It's called capitalism. We are proud capitalists." Sandreckor has always helped to fund programs toward education and learning, even though in its early years this faced a number of controversies. Litigation in relation to that and its competitive practices lasted until the Great Convergence.
Culture[]
Sandreckor, along with Google, are famed for being the best possible place to work at, both with their casual atmosphere and generous benefits. One of its founding principles according to Hasse was "to make money without doing evil". Early on, Sandreckor competed with Apple for a more relaxed atmosphere, especially during Nikola Tesla's lifetime. One policy that has always existed was Sandreckor's Time Off, a policy where employees spend 20% of working ours doing a project they enjoy. Many of their successful products were created using this system.
The corporate headquarters of Sandreckor is located at Musselbergh, United Kingdom, known as the Sand Castle. It has a wide variety of recreations and diversions. The Sandreckor Museum is located at the visitor's center, tracing the company's history over eighty years of its existence. The forms of recreations at the Sand Castle have substantially evolved over the years, based on the local diversions to each decade of its history, as explained in the museum. From the very beginning, the Sandcastle had its own private trolley system to ferry employees quickly from one building to another.
Sandreckor's home page has had a number of temporary alternate logos in commemoration for special events, known as Sandreckor Doodles. The very first doodle was put on the website in 1919 as a commemoration for the end of World War One. Starting in 1920, Doodles are made by a specific team in the Sandreckor company. Throughout the 1920s, Sandreckor had a number of popular April Fools Jokes on their website. The first was a fictitious service to search for souls in limbo, known as SoulReckenor, seen April 1, 1920. In addition, a number of Easter eggs are placed throughout Sandreckor's search engine and other services, as references to popular novels, games, memes, and films.
Controversy[]
Sandreckor's original mission and focus has always been based on a robust idealism, and their ultimate focus on bringing the Internet together under one governance continued throughout the entire 20th century. However, from the 1930s until the 1950s at least, the company suffered a number of controversies and criticisms over the years, largely related to legal, ethical and the environment.
In 1933, Sandreckor was found collaborating with a number of other software organizations, in the process of delivering user information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of Project PRISM. This information was largely meant to be used to find possible Communist insurgencies in the US. Copyright laws, thankfully, became more void of an issue after the Great Convergence, but censorship remained for a long time. Most nations in the communist bloc, especially the Soviet Union kept Sandreckor under tight control within their nations until the 1980s, when the iron curtain began to collapse.
As the Internet gradually came under one convergence in the late 20th century, Sandreckor and its sister organization Google came under a new flurry of controversy, related to monopoly and competition. Many extreme individualists on the Internet bucked against the gradual takeover of Google, with some even threatening violent action in the early 1990s. This was ultimately resolved, and Google since around 2002 has remained the sole governing authority over all information on the World Wide Web.