The history of Google

It is hard to start a query on the web today without using the largest of the search engines: Google. Before it became one of the biggest American firms, the company began as a small one-person business. Our SEO agency walks through the full history of its founders and of the company.

Google: a web giant

Who does not know Google today? This particularly powerful search engine is also the most popular in the world. A search engine is a computer application used to look up information via the internet. Users especially appreciate Google’s SERPs (search engine result pages) for their neutrality. The search engine is not influenced by any advertising factor. Google has the best user satisfaction rate and the best rate of economic growth. The search engine incorporates several algorithms, which are updated very often. Those algorithms filter the search results so that only the most relevant sites are shown.

Mid-1990s: the start of an ambitious project

Everything starts for Google in 1995. At that time, two young American students meet at Stanford University. They are Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Carrying an ambitious project, these two promising students launch BackRub in 1996. This first search engine, hosted on the university’s servers, has a clear mission: to analyze the links pointing to a website. In 1997, the two friends take real control of their project with the goal of making it grow. It is in 1997 that the project is renamed Google, in reference to “googol”, meaning 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Short of resources, Google starts with several low-powered machines linked together to create a combined system.

In 1998, things accelerate thanks to a first investment of 100,000 dollars, paid by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The entrepreneurs first rented a garage as the company’s premises. A year later, the co-founders have to move to Palo Alto because of the growing headcount. 1999 marks a real turning point for Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as they move their brand-new company to Mountain View. That first step is followed by a fundraising round of 25 million dollars, which finally lets the company take off. The number of daily searches quickly rises to 3 million, which attracts advertisers interested in that visibility.

Today, the company offers technology services for consumers. Its mission is to manage and distribute information at scale. Its reputation on the internet has made it one of the largest American firms. On the web, Google is among the Big Four of the internet, with Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. Its market share has kept climbing since the beginning.

Innovation and diversification, the keys to Google’s success

With more than a billion pages ranked, Google is a search engine that has put innovation and diversification at the heart of its requirements since it was created. In 2000, Google AdWords is born, and with it a targeted advertising system based on keywords.

Another strength of the American firm is offering information in 10 new languages, which is a real novelty at the start of the 2000s. As the spearhead of a new digital era, that of the 21st century, Google marks its time.

In 2001, Eric Schmidt is named the company’s first CEO. The company opens offices in Europe and Asia. That same year, Google Images appears. In 2002, Google becomes an international brand by signing a contract with the giant Boeing.

Today, Google stands out in several ways:

• it records 40,000 search queries per second. Over the course of a day, Google therefore processes 3.5 billion searches worldwide.

• this search engine published a report in 2012. That account estimates that Google has discovered more than 30 trillion unique URLs on the web, inspects 20 billion sites every day, and processes 100 billion searches every month.

• the American company Alphabet.Inc was created in 2015 as a corporate conglomerate. It is the parent company of Google and of its other companies. This reorganization was completed on 2 October 2015.

• Google rose to first place in the ranking of the most visited multi-platform websites in the United States in November 2015. The platform recorded 247 million unique visitors in the United States alone. The company also holds 63.9% of market share among the main American search engines.

A closer look at Google’s founders

Larry Page

Lawrence (Larry) Page is a computer scientist and entrepreneur of American origin. A co-founder of Google, he runs Alphabet.Inc. Born on 26 March 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan, Page comes from a family of computer scientists. His father held a doctorate in computer science. He also taught at Michigan State University. His mother likewise taught computer programming. The entrepreneur fed his passion for science and technology by regularly leafing through books and magazines. The CEO of Alphabet.Inc holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.

On a more personal note, Larry Page married Lucinda Southworth in 2007. She is a well-known scientific researcher. Page was influenced by the story of his grandfather during the labor movements. His grandfather had indeed lived through dark hours in his professional life. That is one reason the entrepreneur wanted Google’s companies to be pleasant places for employees. The CEO admires the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla. The Page Foundation regularly makes donations to charitable organizations.

Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin is the co-founder of the internet giant Google. He is also the company’s chief technology officer. In 2011, Forbes (an American business magazine) placed him 24th in the ranking of the world’s largest fortunes. His wealth is estimated at 19.8 billion dollars. Brin comes from a family of mathematicians, which is where his passion for the subject comes from. His father was a mathematics professor. Google’s co-founder earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland in 1993. He continues his studies at Stanford University. After a master’s in computer science, Brin meets Page. Together, the two entrepreneurs focus on a search-engine project.

Based in Russia, Brin’s parents moved to California. The entrepreneur of Russian origin married Anne Wojcicki in 2007. She heads a startup called 23andme.com. The startup’s mission is to help people decode their genetic information. Sergey Brin is passionate about that project and donated 3.9 million dollars. Google’s director also funded research focused on Parkinson’s disease in 2008.

Google and its new products, the fruit of a meteoric rise

Google has never stopped developing new products. From 2003, those innovations followed the company’s rise, with the creation of Google News and AdSense among others. The success is so striking that in 2004 Google goes public. Its market capitalization is then set at 50 billion dollars. Google reports revenue of about 850 million dollars. Gmail then launches and pushes Caramail out of the competition.

In 2005, geolocated search arrives among Google’s new products. The firm launches Google Maps, which quickly becomes indispensable. A real little GPS, it lets millions of users find their way easily.

Eager to develop its services even further, Google offers still more possibilities in 2006. Users can now, among other things:

• retouch photos with Picasa

• find useful information on the stock market, thanks to the Finance application

• see the main searches with Google Trends

• use Books and Calendar to stay organized and consult books online

• watch an impressive number of videos with YouTube, Dailymotion’s main competitor

From 2010, Google creates Chrome. This browser very quickly becomes a hit, since more than half of users adopt it. Google Art Project is born in 2011 and offers users the chance to view thousands of works of art in high definition. Google’s areas of competence therefore expand year after year. Besides making searches possible, Google is also a real advertising showcase. In 2012, that activity brought in more than 50 billion dollars. In France, Google holds more than 90% of market share.