The Rise of Google
The most popular search engine on the planet, google is an internet powerhouse that’s shaped much of the world we live in today. The company was founded in 1995 and has grown from its humble beginnings to now have an almost overwhelming presence on the internet. The search engine is so dominant that people even use the term ‘google’ as a verb, such as when someone searches for something and they say they “googled it.”
Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while they were graduate students at Stanford University in California. The two decided to create a website to help with their research projects, but as they began attracting more traffic they realized that they could make money from it. They started by creating a search engine called BackRub, which used the information from the web to determine what websites were most relevant and ordered them by how often they appeared on other webpages. It also included a data collection system known as PageRank, which counted how many times a certain word appeared on a page to improve a website’s ranking in search results.
In 1998, the pair got their first big round of funding and renamed the company to Google after the term “googol,” which refers to a number 1 followed by 100 zeros. By 1999, they were handling more than 200 million searches a day, and they were so popular that their name was even used as a verb, meaning to search online.
As Google grew, it added more services and products to its roster, including a free email service (Gmail), maps, a video sharing site and an online office suite. It even developed its own operating system for mobile devices, which is now a part of the larger Android platform. In 2010, the company expanded further by acquiring social networking sites and other online tools, such as Blogger and YouTube.
Although Google is now a publicly-traded company, it still remains one of the most powerful and influential forces on the internet. Its market dominance has prompted some concern over the amount of control it can have over online content. For example, there are concerns that it may be censoring or hiding content.
The company now has over a hundred subsidiaries, most of which are focused on specific technologies, such as cloud computing and hardware. In addition to its flagship search engine, Google has also been a major player in artificial intelligence (AI) and other fields.
