A Brief History of Google

Google is one of the most influential forces in modern life. Its search engine is used billions of times a day and is one of the most widely known Internet services. Its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, designed the company while they were graduate students at Stanford University. The company has since grown into a multinational corporation with operations across several sectors, including hardware, cloud computing, advertising and software. Google is also involved in the development of artificial intelligence.

In the early 1990s, Bryn and Page worked on a search engine called BackRub while they were attending graduate school at Stanford. The system was based on the idea that academic papers were often ranked by the number of citations they received; the more a paper was referenced, the higher it would rank in a search. They took this concept and applied it to the World Wide Web, creating a page ranking algorithm that relied on the number of pages that linked to a given web page. This method helped Google quickly rise to prominence amongst the top internet search engines of the time.

By the late 1990s, Google’s search engine was the most popular on the Internet, handling more than 200 million searches per day. The company’s name became so familiar that it entered the lexicon as a verb; users soon began “googling” everything from their personal information to news articles. In 2004, the company went public, making Page and Brin instant multimillionaires. The company’s initial public offering was so successful that it made it the second-largest publicly traded corporation in the United States at the time.

As Google grew, it acquired numerous other Internet services. These included Google Earth, the popular online map service; Gmail, an email server; and a variety of other online tools such as online calculators, image search and social networking sites. The company’s headquarters are in Mountain View, California, and it maintains data centers around the world to accommodate the needs of its rapidly expanding global customer base.

As Google diversified, it adopted the slogan “don’t be evil” as its code of conduct. In 2015, the company reorganized into Alphabet Inc., and its search engine remains its most popular service. Other well-known offerings include the Pixel smartphone line, Chromecast in-home streaming device and the Chromebook laptop range. In addition, Google offers a suite of office productivity tools called Workspace and produces physical products such as the Nest smart home device.