Founded on September 4, 1998, by two Stanford Ph.D. Student, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, Google has lived elegantly for 23 long years and continues to rule the search engine kingdom as ever before. Google has witnessed so many milestones in its journey – and it has been successful in all its innovations. Introduced to the world as a search engine, Google developed its own operating system and extended its services for work and productivity so much that Google has become the internet for many users.
As its 23rd anniversary is nearing, let’s look back at how Google evolved in the past two decades. In this article Enjoy
An Astonishing Journey – From the Garage to the Googleplex
It all started with a humble beginning and turned out to be one of the most popular search engines on the globe. Page and Brin were intrigued with the idea of accumulating mass data available on the internet and extracting meaning from it. Their first office was Page’s dormitory room at Stanford where the duo devised a new type of search technology which was named BackRub.
This innovation soon caught the attention of not only the academic community but Silicon Valley investors as well. Backrub was renamed Google and in August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. was officially born. This investment led the founders to upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California. The work started from dormitories, moved to a garage, and swung high to multi-facilitated, hi-tech offices in the Googleplex (190,000 square meters of office space). Since then, there was no looking back.
12 Unknown but Interesting Facts About Google
After the struggling & thrilling journey of google let’s check interesting facts about google according to Vinsys.
1. ‘Google’ was a misspelled word
Initially Page and Brin wanted to name their search engine ‘Googol’. The term ‘Googol’ refers to a very large number (ten raised to the power of a hundred). Both Page and Brin were fascinated by the name but ended up with ‘Google’ due to a spelling mistake on a cheque that investors wrote to the founders at the time of registering. That turned favorable because later they found that ‘Googol.com’ wasn’t available. Consequently, they registered the website with the domain ‘Google.com’ that had similar pronunciation but spelled differently. Also, Google owns domains for the common misspellings of its own name, such as gooogle.com, gogle.com, and googlr.com.
2. ‘Gmail’ was introduced to the world on April Fools Day
Crazy innovations mark the roots of Google. Google appreciates and welcomes novice ideas and one of them was introducing their emailing service ‘Gmail’ on April 1, 2004. People didn’t believe it as the company also gave away 1GB (meant a lot of free data back in 2004) which raised more suspicion. But we know where Gmail ranks today.
3. The first-ever Google server was made out of stacked Legos
Colorful and unconventional, as Google has been famous for until today, the first Google server was made out of stacked Legos in 1996 by co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Interestingly, it used all of the Google colors – red, blue, yellow and green. They also piled in 10 4GB hard drives into the Lego model.
4. Google proposed to sell its search engine to Yahoo in 1997
Before the official launch of Google in 1998, the founders had approached Yahoo to sell their patented technology PageRank system for $1 million. Yahoo turned down the offer and soon realized its mistake. In 2002, when Google’s valuation raised, Yahoo presented an offer to buy Google for $3 billion, but the duo turned it down.
5. Google operates in over 100 languages
To provide customized services and search results, Google is available in over 100 languages. As well as they provide translation services in more than 250 languages It allows users to use the Google interface in another language or visit Google’s site in a specific country.
6. The Dynamic Logo Concept
Google’s web logo usage is an example of dynamic branding, whereby the brand dynamically adjusts a part of its identity in response to external events – such as festive celebrations. The changing Google logo is only adjusted on their website, which is a singular, tightly controlled media space. Google also makes its logo colorless on certain days to mark tragedies.
7. From Noun to Verb
Google became so popular that it entered the common lexicon. It was officially added as a verb to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2006, which defined it as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web”.
8. Google Images had an unusual story
The Google Image search, launched in 2001 was inspired by the worldwide interest in singer Jennifer Lopez’s 2000 Grammy outfit – the now iconic green Versace dress. The then text-dominated internet had gone crazy over Grammy’s night and people wanted more than just text. That led to the birth of Google Images which is obviously the source of all the images that go viral on social media.
9. The YouTube acquisition
YouTube became part of the Google family in 2006. It was bought for more than $1.5 billion. The video streaming app is flooded with more than 1000 videos per minute and contributes highly to the company’s revenue.
10. Google’s Android leads the Operating Systems Market Share
Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million in July 2005. Google has developed Android TV for televisions, Android Auto for cars, and Wear OS for wearables, each with a specialized user interface.
Android owns 87 percent of the Operating System market share worldwide. It is the most popular OS used by the majority of internet inhabitants due to its ease of access and user-friendliness.
11. Google’s first tweet caught a multitude of attention
On February 2009, Google tweeted for the first time on Twitter and as geeky as it could, the tweet read, “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010.”
For those who are not aware of binary language, it means “I’m feeling lucky.”
12. The Birthdate Conflict
The company was founded on September 4, however, there is conflict over the birthdate. Google celebrated its birthday on Sept. 7 and Sept. 8 in 2004 and 2003 respectively while the date was Sept. 26 in 2018. But It is Generally 27th Sept.
Google’s Timeline At Glance
1998
- Google.com was registered
- Google had an index of about 60 million pages
1999
- The company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto in the Silicon Valley. The complex is now known as Googleplex. In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for US$319 million
2000
- Google began selling advertisements associated with keywords.
2003
- Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of the Blogger website.
2004
- Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google
- Orkut was launched (retired in September 2014)
2005
- Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world’s biggest media companies by stock market value
- Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) R&D center at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
2006
- Google was added to the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31
- Purchased some of Silicon Graphics’ properties, including the Googleplex, for $319 million.
- Formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems
- Signed a $900 million offer with News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media unit
2007
- Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, marking the start of its use of cookie-based tracking.
- Google Earth was used for the first time
2008
- Google Friend Connect was launched (retired by March 1, 2012)
2011
- Google+ was launched
2019
- Launched Google Stadia, a cloud gaming platform
2021
- Launch of Google Meet
Google’s journey has been amazing from a handful of employees in a Menlo Park garage, Google today has tens of thousands of employees and offices in nearly 60 countries. Presently under the leadership of Sundar Pichai, Google has soared high to witness a revenue jump of 26 percent to $23.3 billion in the second quarter in 2018. The traffic acquisition costs, a key metric in Google’s ad business, went up to 23 percent of ad revenue in the second quarter. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $26.24 billion in revenue for the quarter that ended on June 30 – making a profit of $3.2 billion.
Google has recently launched a new search engine for the scientific community that will help them make sense of millions of datasets. The service, called Dataset Search, will help scientists, data journalists find the data required for their work and their stories – or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. The company had previously introduced Google Scholar, an exclusive search engine for academic studies and reports.
Growing at a rapid pace since its inception, Google is a BIG NAME and rules the search engine space even today. On September 27, 2021, Google sparkles 23 years of its glorious history and the entire internet will applaud cheers on the occasion.
Happy 23rd to you Google, The Search Engine Giant!!!
