Recently, our favorite search engine, Google, turned twenty-five years old. What you are about to read will explain how Google went from the dreams of two college students in their garage, into the megacorporation it is today.
1995
Imagine this if you will, you and your friend have a grand idea, a way of making information available to everyone on the planet, a search engine. This was a reality for two Stanford students called Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. Though they didn’t call it “Google” yet, the term “BackRub”, was working well. However, this was only the beginning of their journey.
1996
1996 was the first year Page and Brin founded the name Google. Many people to this day think the mathematical term, googol, was made from Google, but it’s actually the other way around. The student’s goal was to organize a large amount of information, so they named it after googol, an extremely large mathematical term.
1998
On September 4th of 1998, the two had officially founded Google inc. Their base of operation was small, housing their entire service in a garage in California. But it didn’t matter their size because Google was a hit! People all across America were using it. After having invented a software called PageRank, Larry and Sergey had grown their company into a huge corporation. There are many ways to view this classic version, the most popular of which is elgooG’s Google in 1998 doodle.
1999
In 1999, the search engine was getting around 500,000 queries per day. This boost of popularity led to Sequoia Capital giving Google a $25 million dollar investment. This allowed the two to enlarge their company tenfold, hire employees, get a better base of operations, and overall grow into an internet powerhouse. And with 60% of the internet using Google to find websites, Google became the most popular search engine. But the story isn’t over yet.
2000-2001
At the turn of the millennium, Google introduced AdWords. This program allowed businesses to place personalized ads to people who searched for something specific on Google. This idea brought in a high majority of Google’s revenue in the next few years. In 2001 progress continued exponentially, in fact, in the same year Google released its first international version to Germany. At this point 80% of internet users used Google to search anything from memes, to news articles. Eventually, other internet companies like Yahoo and AOL discovered Google’s success and tried to compete by using Google’s strategy of adding new software, but they were no match for the growing giant.
2002
Google would try something in 2002 that would be the icing on the cake for the emerging tech giant. They went public with an initial public offering, which was a big risk for the company. But this risk would pay off because they had raised $1.67 billion dollars. This raise in money put the company’s value at around $23 billion. With this growth came new additions like Google Images, and Google news. Near the end of the year, Yahoo would try to buy Google, but were turned down almost immediately.
2003-2010
Google evolved over the next decade, buying multiple companies in the process. The first of which was in 2004 when they bought a company called Keyhole Inc., now Google Maps, and YouTube which was still a young company at the time. Three years later they released a mobile operating system called Android OS, which was a hit among the people. A company called Samsung would be the main phone to use this OS. And finally, a few years later, Google would launch Google Chrome, one of the most popular web browsers in the world.
2010-2023
In the 2010s and early 2020s, few changes were made. Google reorganized under the parent company known as Alphabet Inc., in 2015. They made an AI and a phone company called Google Pixel. Google is currently working on major updates to their site while seeing what works for their consumers. The future looks bright for Google, we wait and see what Google’s next innovation will be.
