The history of Google

Google dominates the UK search engine market by a substantial margin, and is just keeping Yahoo! in second place in the US market. Due to its dominance, it is the major target for the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing community.

Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 1998, the Google story started when both Larry and Sergey attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, as students in computer science. In 1996 they began collaborating on a search engine called ‘backrub´, so named because of its unique ability to analyse back-links (inbound site links). Larry and Segey continued the development of ‘backrub´ into 1998, buying their first chunk of storage, and housing it in Larry´s dormitory. Sergey, the commercially focused part of the double act, began the process of finding a potential licensee for their search technology.

With little initial success, one of the people they called was the founder of Yahoo!, David Filo. He encouraged them to follow in his footsteps and go-it-alone - they did. Now with the focus on finding funding for the development of their own search engine company they met with Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. In short, he wrote them a cheque for $100,000 made payable to Google Inc. A short time later and with more finance secured, Google Inc. moved to their first office - well, garage, in Menlo Park, California, to be precise. Soon to join was their first employee Craig Silverstein, Google´s director of technology. By the end of 1998 Google.com was already generating a lot of interest with over 10,000 search queries being answered every day.

The beginning of 1999 saw Google grow with a move into bigger offices in Palo Alto and importantly the volume of search queries being answered grew to half a million every day. By the middle of 1999 Google Inc. had secured its second round of funding - now into tens of millions of dollars. With a number of significant appointments and space running out quickly, the Googleplex was born and the company moved in - It´s still the Google HQ today. By now AOL-Netscape had appointed Google as it web search provider. With over 3 million searches every day you could say Google has evolved from dream to reality. In September 1999 the Beta label was removed.

During 2000 the rate of growth at Google increased dramatically with the launch of 10 language versions, an every increasing number of appointments, and an ever-growing number of awards scattered around the Googleplex offices. Google had its first paying customers, with corporations using the Google technology on their own sites. 2000 also saw the launch of the first keyword based advertising programme (pay-per-click or PPC service) - the for-runner of the Adwords and Adsense platforms we have today. The growth continued apace with major partnerships deals with Yahoo! and with portals in Japan and China. The Google toolbar also made its debut, as did Google´s first ventures into mobile search, and Google reached the 100 million searches per day mark.

In 2001 the expansion continued in the way that was now common at Google. The purchase of Deja.com saw the additional of huge volumes of Usenet messages. The Google Zeitgeist made its first startling revelations by publishing the top global searches. Google continued to increase its global reach and added new technologies that allowed it to crawl ever increasing volumes and types of material. Google image search and Google Catalog search where born - by now Google had amassed over 3 billion searchable documents. By the end of 2001, and to the amazement of most, Google declared that red had become black and Google was profitable despite its continued expansion.

In 2002 the Google search appliance (search in a box) concept was launched with Google servers being introduced into large corporations, Universities and the like. The servers allowed the Google crawler known as Googlebot, to get behind the firewall and bring the power of the Google technology into the workplace. 2001 had seen Google win their first set of awards from the Search Engine Optimisation and Webmaster community site, Search Engine Watch. The Google API was launched - an access point for applications that allowed them direct access the index and other Google services. This initiative kicked off a wave that is still growing today, with increasing numbers of applications and services based around Google. Adwords, Google´s pay-per-click (PPC) service, continued to grow and expand, not only on Google.com but with partners like America online who appointed them to answer queries and serve adverts to it´s 30+ million customers. Google news and Froogle both launched towards the end of 2002, rounding off another amazing year for Google Inc.

Recognising the future in blogging, Google acquired Pyra Labs in 2003 and became a major provider to the blog (weblog) community. Adsense was launched, allowing web site owners the opportunity to earn revenue from their content by serving contextual ads directly on their site pages. Version 2 of the Google Toolbar was released with new tools such as the pop-up blocker and the form filler, a service that automatically populates forms with personal content.

2004 was another typically huge year for Google with the site index growing to over 8 billion pages. and awards for the Brand of the Year under their belt and the launch of Google Local Search followed very quickly with the ability for advertisers to target an audience within specific geographies or within reach of their business. By April Gmail, Google´s mail service had made its debut offering a free service with a gigabyte of free storage for each user. Gmail benefited from many of the Google innovations and became a favoured platform for many including advertisers that could target ads to users based on the message content. Google rolled out major upgrades to both its Blogger and Google Search Appliance.

2004 also saw Google announce it´s initial IPO as well as the acquisition of Picasa Inc., the digital photo management organisation that developed technology to allow Bloggers to post images and share them within the Blogger community. This was followed by the acquisition of Keyhole Corp., the digital satellite and imaging company, allowing Google users to search and view 3D images and access a database of points of interest - this would ultimately become Google Earth which launched in 2005. It announced its first quarter results as a publicly listed company with revenues at over $800 million. Google rounded off the year with expansion in Europe as well as new R&D facilities in Japan.

2005 saw to launch of Google Video while the Google Image service grew to contain over 1 billion images. Another version of the Google desktop search application was released with expanded capabilities for MP3 and PDF searching as well as more language versions. Followed shortly by an Enterprise version, Google continued to take on other major names in the desktop space - namely Microsoft Inc. Unchin Software became another acquisition which added the ability to track and monitor user behaviour, site traffic and ad tracking to the Google offering - Google Analytics emerged in late 2005. Adsense expanded to allow bloggers to earn by placing contextual ads on their blogs.

2005 also saw the development of services for both the Search Engine Optimisation and Webmaster community with services such as Sitemaps, which help with getting sites indexed or added to the Google database. Google Earth landed and Google Talk spoke. Google talk is an Internet based service that allows people to talk via their computer. Google Desktop got new goodies to allow access to RSS feeds, as well as other web content. Google Blog search emerged towards the end of 2005, soon followed by the merging of Google Maps into the Google Local service. The Google Reader allowing the aggregation of many disparate services and information such as RSS feeds into one easy to use interface, emerged. Google finished the year in good style with the opening of yet more offices and important senior recruitment to control its global charge including announcing its $1 billion deal to expand the AOL alliance.

2006 started, as no doubt it will end, with yet another launch. This time it was the Google Video store and Google Pack, a set of free tools aimed at improving the web user experience. The latest announcement from the Googleplex is the $1.65 billion agreement to acquire YouTube Inc. YouTube, founded less than 2 years ago, has stunned the market with its amazing growth. What´s of real interest is the advertising model that Google says that it will adopt with the content contributors earning a percentage of revenues generated from the download of their video content. No doubt this will lead to significant opportunities with commercial content providers in the future as the online moving image market takes off. Already with some 100 million downloads every day, this deal is set to expand the remit of Google´s ad-brokering activities.

We´ll regularly revisit this page and make additional entries as the future of one of the world´s favourite online brands unfolds.

www.google.com and www.google.co.uk