The story of Google started in 1995 when two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, invented a search algorithm. The project also involved a third founder Scott Hassan who wrote much of the code for the algorithm but left the project before Google was officially launched. On September 1997, the founders registered the google.com domain name for the first time.
According to searchengineland, Google reigns as the world’s leading search engine, boasting a dominant market share of over 80% globally and nearly 80% in the U.S. Though exact figures from the company are unavailable, estimates suggest that Google facilitates billions of searches annually, amounting to trillions over the course of a year.
Starting from their dorm rooms, transitioning to a garage office in Menlo Park, California, and finally creating a professional office in the mountain area of California has been an unconventional journey. The same office is now the headquarters of Google and is called Googleplex.
Progressive Period
Larry and Sergey nicknamed this initial project. It underwent hundreds of revisions and optimizations since its launch in 1995. If we talk about the proper launch of Google, it happened in 1995. co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim, invested $100,000 in Google. They convinced a couple of more investors and collected 1 million dollars.
With the help of this money, they created the office, which is now the headquarters of Google in Menlo Park. Google expanded its office space and team members, hiring engineers and marketing and sales teams. Google held Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2004. It yielded extraordinary results in increasing Google’s share in the market. To be accurate, this IPO raised $1.6 billion for Google and created several billionaires. To be accurate, 7 billionaires, and 700 millionaires. Brin and Page finally realized their dream and made Google the number one media company in the world.
How Larry and Sergey Met and Devised the Algorithm
Larry Page was searching for a grad school. Then, he came across Stanford, and Sergey Brin helped him decide to enroll at Standford. Initially, they couldn’t agree on anything much, but just after a year, they struck a partnership together. So they started working from the dormitory of Larry Page. They had a mission to organize the world’s information and make it accessible to everyone. Both partners worked hard day and night and finally succeeded in their project. They invented the new search algorithm and named it PageRank.
The PageRank algorithm found the number of links pointing to a site. And determined the site’s importance based on the value of those links. They noticed that search engines displayed a website page that had a repetition of keywords. However, their algorithm worked on the point that the website with more links pointing towards it was ranked on top of other sites with fewer connections. They named their algorithm “Backrub” and renamed it later Google. The term “Google” expressed the mathematical expression with one following with 100 zeros. In reality, Google is the misspelling of the term Googol denoting mathematical expression.
Google’s Internal Structure and Growth
Around 1999, Google only processed 500,000 queries. This number raised from 200 million questions within a few years to 3 billion in 2011. The growth has just multiplied exponentially over the years. This staggering amount of searches made Google so famous that this word entered the dictionary. The word “Googling” means to search for information on the net. As a result, to handle the ever-growing demand for information, Google created 11 data centers worldwide. These servers are personal computers consisting of hard drives stacked together. In the beginning, Google faced management problems internally.
The founders made Eric Schmidt the Chief Executive Officer of the company. At that time, Larry Page was serving as the president of products. While Sergey Brin was working as the president of technology. Around 2015, Google became the subsidiary company of Alphabet Inc. Thus, the main products like Gmail, YouTube, and Android remained under Google. While some other projects like Calico, Nest, and Google X came under the umbrella of Alphabet. After 2000, Google rapidly grew due to the advertisement feature. Consequently, thousands of advertisers started giving more attention to Google. Around 2000, the global ad spending on traditional media like newspapers, TV, and magazines was around $64 billion, and online ad spending was $ 6 billion. After just 11 years, in 2011, the traditional ad spending was reduced to just $20 billion, while online ad spending hit a staggering $64 billion annually.
Google acquired a couple of advertising platforms to solidify its ad revenue strategy. In 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics, making AdSense the biggest advertising platform that generates a heft amount of revenue for Google. The other two acquisitions of Google are dMarc Broadcasting and Admob. Additionally, Google also acquired rights to sell ads on MySpace.com.
Assortment of Products
Google started as a search engine company. Gradually, it launched a full assortment of its products ranging from Google maps, browsers, docs, and sheets to Google Assistant and Gmail. Google offers several tools, apps, and services to the public. As a result, this huge portfolio of Google makes it a powerful competitor of 4 tech giants like IBM, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
History of Google Docs
Google doc is an online tool for creating documents. Users can edit them in collaboration with other users in real-time. It came into existence by combining two technologies, the app Writely and XL2 Web. Google acquired Upstartle company, the creator of the content app Writely. In 2010, Google acquired DocVerse, which allowed multiple users to collaborate online. After two years, Google documents were renamed Google docs. In addition, the Chrome version of Google docs, Google sheets, and Google slides was also introduced in the same year. The latest feature incorporated Grammarly suggestions and it was released in 2019.
History of Google Chrome
Do you remember the struggles in the days of Internet Explorer? At that time Internet Explorer was the only way to search for information online. The majority of internet users used Internet Explorer at that time. Around 2008, Microsoft was facing challenges complying with open web standards. Thus, internet users were also growing frustrated by the poor performance of Internet Explorer. Mozilla Firefox was gaining a good reputation in the online market. At the same time, Google launched its first-ever browser, Google Chrome. Initially, Google launched Google Chrome as a windows browser. But it adjusted to macOS and Linux systems after a year. Within a decade of its release, Chrome secured more than 60% of the market share. The chrome developers keep tweaking it to avail the latest technology. They introduce new features now and then and wonder if it’s compatible with major systems. The good news is that It is compatible with Microsoft, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android.
History of Gmail:
Google created Gmail which is an online email service provider. It was launched in 2004 to a selected few users. They were the beta users then. Gmail was fully open to the general masses in 2007. The competitors of Gmail were Hotmail and yahoo.com. However, Gmail gave them a tough time by offering up to 1GB of free space. It kept on expanding and now offers 15 GB of free storage. Users could use this space among Google Gmail, Google Drive, and Google photos. You can also rent more space in terabytes by paying for it. One distinguishing feature of Gmail is that it’s based on the web. So you can access it from any internet-enabled device. It can be a smartphone, desktop computer, or laptop. In 2010, Google added the Buzz network to Gmail. Users could communicate now with their Gmail contacts by sharing messages and photos.
But it was unpopular and Google discontinued it after a few years. When Google noticed hacking attacks on the accounts of China’s human rights activists, it immediately transferred from HTTP to HTTPS for enhanced security. It went further to acquire an amazing email security firm, Postini. After Google acquired Postini, the security concerns of businesses have also been resolved. The most interesting feature Gmail offers is the smart reply feature. It is based on artificial intelligence, which lets you auto-complete your sentences. It saves the user’s time by allowing him to auto-type frequently used sentences. The same year it introduced better ways to cope with spammy emails. It did so by improving the deliverability accuracy to 99.9%. The following year, email composition included the auto-reply feature.
History of Google play store
Google Play, renamed Google play store, was launched in March 2012. It came out as a digital distribution channel. You could find Google movies, music, ebooks, and apps under the same umbrella. Google rebranded several of its apps, falling within the play store domain. The Google Play Newsstand was renamed Google news. While YouTube replaced Play Music. Google announced to shut down Play Games in 2022 and return the Windows android version with the same name. Users downloaded apps around 111 billion times in 2021 alone. It shows the popularity of the Google play store.
By 2022, more than 3.5 million apps will be on the Google play store. Developers of around 150 countries can upload apps on the Google play store. Users can pre-book the apps and use the app as alpha or beta testers. Google launched Google’s gaming app in 2013, where users could play online different games. They played in real-time in a team setting. Google’s Play Books stores ebooks from around 75 countries. It allows users to upload up to 1000 ebooks. Apart from books and games, Google Play TV also provides access to movies on demand. Movies are available from around 110 countries, while the shows are only available in selected countries. In 2020, Google renamed this service Google Play TV was renamed Google Tv.
Google’s history timeline:
1995: Project backrub initiated 1997: google.com domain name registered 1998: Google was officially launcher 1998: Google started showing text ads because both founders accepted the advertising model soon. 1999: Co-founders decided to sell Google to Excite company, but Excite rejected the offer. 2016: Google launched its AI assistant, competing with Amazon's Alexa and Apple'sApple's Siri. 2000: Google began selling advertising services by selling space for text ads. 2003: Google acquired Pyra Labs, which owns the Blogger.com platform. 2004: Yahoo discontinued its partnership with Google and started its search engine. 2004: Initial Public Offering (IPO) was held on a larger scale. It enhanced Google's market share. 2005: Google became the biggest media company in market share. Its worth was around $50 billion at that time. 2006: Google acquired a radio advertising company, dMarc. 2006: S & P 500 index added Google which caused its share value to increase by 7%. 2007: Google bought DoubleClick and started using web-based HTTP cookies. They helped in tracking user behavior online. 2008: Google launched its Wikipedia alternative Knol, which failed within four years. 2008: Google launched Google Friend Connect which failed four years later. 2010: The launch of Google Buzz, which failed a year later. 2010: Google began working on self-driving cars. It became a separate business named Waymo. 2010: Google bought Nexus 1 to compete in the mobile hardware space. 2011: The launch of Google+ to enter the social media marketing space. 2011: Google bought Motorola Mobility to compete more in the mobile computing domain. 2014: Google acquired a research lab based on artificial intelligence, DeepMind. 2015: Google reorganizes itself as a leafing subsidiary of Alphabet company. 2017: Google became a limited liability company.
Final thoughts:
In conclusion, Google came into existence as a result of the dream of its founders to organize the world’s information in one place. Consequently, their dream turned into reality soon, making it the biggest media company in the world by 2005. Its algorithm based the web page’ authenticity and value based on the number of sites pointing towards the web page. Therefore, this measurement of the web page’s importance continues to this date. Google didn’t stay restricted to just search engine capacity but expanded itself to include various other web-based and desktop applications. On the whole, it has mastered the art of growing and becoming the cloud technology champion.
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