History of Google

The story of Google

Google is now the most dominant search tool on the Internet, setting the standards that others try to follow and better yet without success. It was founded in 1998 - relatively late compared to many popular search engines - by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were students from Stanford University.

Page and Brin had worked together on a search engine, which they called "BackRub" since early 1996, but with support from Yahoo! Co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a business in 1998 and went looking for investors to back them. Google, Inc. was established on 7 September 1998. The founders hired Craig Silverstein - who later became Director of Technology - as their first employee, and started the business in a friend's garage. 

Google was still in an alpha stage, with an index of just 25 million pages, but it was handling 10,000 queries each day. The search engine, and the company grew rapidly from mouth to mouth, first with ordinary Web users who come across this tool and find the results to their liking. 

Usage spread rapidly through press coverage, awards and recommendations, while Google's efficiency and relevance, its speed and reliability, and purely visual and 'quirky' character all contributed to a rapid increase in the number of new supporters. 

Google took a big step forward in 2000 when it replaced Inktomi as the provider of supplementary search results on Yahoo. After that, it was further successes and provided search data for Yahoo as its primary outcome, as well as AOL, Netscape, Free services and the BBC in Britain. This gave Google extraordinary coverage of Internet searches, and established its reputation as one of the most reliable and accurate search tools that make it the clear market leader. 

Despite losing the Yahoo relationship in 2004, continued with Google to increase its coverage of Web search market and developed a series of regional versions of its search tool, both in English and other languages so that the global dominance grew. In Britain, Google now accounts for over 70% of Web searches performed. 

Google has also been actively developing a range of search options, including an image search, news search, shopping search engine (Froogle) and local search capabilities. Furthermore, it is after Google's IPO in early 2005 has set a course for Internet domination and to challenge Microsoft as the leading provider of computer services. There have been several announcements about new products, including e-mail service, Gmail, the amazing Google Earth product, Google Talk, to compete in the growing VoIP market, Google Base and Google Book Search, as part of its ambitious project to make the contents of thousands of books searchable online. 

Google has become synonymous with search and have concluded a dictionary as a verb - 'Google' something. Expansion and integration of all of Google's various services, making it a dominant player in the online market, but for many websites, Google is also the final target location which will make a significant difference between the volumes of traffic being received from potential customers to search on the Internet.