History of Google: the company that gave life to the famous search engine was born in September 1998
Google turns 25: in fact it was September 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page in a garage in Menlo Park in perfect American style, founded the company Google Inc. , creating the famous search engine that we all use today for our online searches . The two founders, in fact, met at Stanford in 1995 and began their friendship which turned into a fruitful professional collaboration.
Today, September 27, the company celebrates its first 25 years with a fantastic doodle, which replaces the O’s with the numbers 2 and 5. Added to these, once you click on the page, is the celebration of the first quarter of a century with the branded confetti and a gif that traces the evolution of the logo.
In this post we will briefly analyze the history of this giant born from the idea of two brilliant students.
The year was 1996: BackRub was born, later called PageRank
We are in 1996 and the Brin-Page duo is working on an algorithm capable of giving priority on the Internet to sites capable of obtaining incoming links from other web pages. This algorithm was called BackRub and would become the precursor to PageRank , giving rise to the whole Google saga. In 1996 the world of the web and information technology was evolving into what we know today: Microsoft had launched the Windows95 operating system the year before, the number of online pages reached 75 million and little by little the need to have a program capable of searching individual pages on the Internet.
Year 1997: the google.com domain was born
Google’s competitors
At the time of the birth of Google, the brand’s main competitors were Lycos, Yahoo, Arianna, MSN, Virgilio, Dogpile and many other small news aggregators and engines on which to type the internet pages of interest and search for topics in which one was interested. . At that time Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not yet aware of what they were creating and tried several times to sell their program to Yahoo in order to continue their studies. But this did not happen and the first investors began to invest in the two and their business idea. We are now in 1998, exactly 20 years ago.
Evolutions
Since 1998, Google has received funding that has allowed it to thrive and evolve into what we know today. In fact KPCB and Sequoia , two venture capital funds invested heavily in the company, which moved from the garage to its current headquarters in Mountain View, Silicon Valley. The real turning point, however, was born with Google ADS , in 2000, which allows you to insert customizable advertising spaces within the platform. Here is the business and profit model that the two partners were looking for and which will bring Google 80% of its turnover.
Since then there have been many algorithm innovations that have allowed Google to refine and improve users’ search results and avoid manipulation by SEO experts.
Here are the main Google algorithms:
- PageRank 1998;
- Google Pandas 2011;
- Google Penguin 2012;
- Google Hummingbird 2013;
- Google Pigeon 2014;
- Rank Brain 2015;
- Mobile First Indexing 2018
- Google Helpful Content Update 2022
To these must be added many updates that the brand develops periodically to make the results of our searches more reliable and to move towards a further objective: that of interpreting them through artificial intelligence, delivering the results that the user was looking for, according to their own interests.
But Google today is also Google+ , born in 2011 as a social network, YouTube , acquired in 2006, Google Glass , artificial intelligence and is part of a larger universe called Alphabet , which has a market value of 850 billion dollars and a turnover exceeding 100 billion dollars.
The future of Google? Artificial Intelligence and Google Bard!
Google’s history teaches us that evolution is always around the corner. Today it is called Google Bard and it is the first Generative Artificial Intelligence, which promises to profoundly change, once again, the entire world of the web.
