Google 10 Today
It's birthdays all around today as Google celebrates its 10th birthday and I celebrate my 28th.
Google has come a long way since their famous search engine went live in September 1998. Back then ambitious young computer science postgrads Larry Paige and Sergey Brin were trying to establish their new business by working fifteen hours a day in a borrowed Menlo Park garage.
Their early work paid off and it wasn't long before Google was recognised for returning relevant search results. A PC Magazine report endorsed Google as the search engine of choice for 1998 and as a result the engine's popularity rocketed.
The company needed new servers to cope with increased demand and relocated a few miles south to larger new premises in Palo Alto. The workforce at this point was a modest eight full time employees. By the end of 1999 the company had relocated to its current home of Mountain View.
The new millennium signalled the beginning of several famous Google brands including the Toolbar and AdWords. By now Google had also indexed an unrivalled billion pages of information. The search engine itself had been expanded into ten different languages including French, German, Italian and Spanish.
By the end of 2001 Google had introduced the famous Image Search functionality that works alongside their text based search engine. Their index had also trebled to include 3 billion pages of information.
2002 saw the introduction of Google APIs, Labs, Froogle and News.
The following year, 2003, was also a busy time for Google. They acquired Pyra Labs and the popular Blogger blog hosting site. AdSense, the contextual advertising service, joined the Google fold and became closely integrated with the existing AdWords service.
In 2004 Google moved across town to new offices in Amphitheatre Parkway. The campus-like development, known as the Googleplex, became home to Google's 800-strong workforce. By the end of the year Google had indexed more than 8 billion pages of information.
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2005 saw more innovation with the release of Google Talk, Scholar, Analytics, Maps, Blog Search, Reader and Earth. The introduction of the new Gmail service, with ever increasing online storage capacity, meant that users would never have to worry about the size of their inboxes again.
The Google empire expanded even further when the company acquired YouTube in late 2006. Google Docs and Spreadsheets also proved a convenient and popular way of saving word processed and numerical data online.
Last year Google expanded the coverage of several of their existing services. AdSense for mobile was also launched, allowing publishers to generate revenue from mobile browsing visitors to their site. Docs was expanded to include slide presentation functionality akin to Microsoft PowerPoint. The introduction of Street View allowed web users a three dimensional view of some sections of Google Maps.
This year has seen Google's first advance into the software market with the introduction of the Chrome web browser.
Wow... I wish the last ten years had been as exciting for me!
Google has come a long way since their famous search engine went live in September 1998. Back then ambitious young computer science postgrads Larry Paige and Sergey Brin were trying to establish their new business by working fifteen hours a day in a borrowed Menlo Park garage.
Their early work paid off and it wasn't long before Google was recognised for returning relevant search results. A PC Magazine report endorsed Google as the search engine of choice for 1998 and as a result the engine's popularity rocketed.
The company needed new servers to cope with increased demand and relocated a few miles south to larger new premises in Palo Alto. The workforce at this point was a modest eight full time employees. By the end of 1999 the company had relocated to its current home of Mountain View.
The new millennium signalled the beginning of several famous Google brands including the Toolbar and AdWords. By now Google had also indexed an unrivalled billion pages of information. The search engine itself had been expanded into ten different languages including French, German, Italian and Spanish.
By the end of 2001 Google had introduced the famous Image Search functionality that works alongside their text based search engine. Their index had also trebled to include 3 billion pages of information.
2002 saw the introduction of Google APIs, Labs, Froogle and News.
The following year, 2003, was also a busy time for Google. They acquired Pyra Labs and the popular Blogger blog hosting site. AdSense, the contextual advertising service, joined the Google fold and became closely integrated with the existing AdWords service.
In 2004 Google moved across town to new offices in Amphitheatre Parkway. The campus-like development, known as the Googleplex, became home to Google's 800-strong workforce. By the end of the year Google had indexed more than 8 billion pages of information.
View Larger Map
2005 saw more innovation with the release of Google Talk, Scholar, Analytics, Maps, Blog Search, Reader and Earth. The introduction of the new Gmail service, with ever increasing online storage capacity, meant that users would never have to worry about the size of their inboxes again.
The Google empire expanded even further when the company acquired YouTube in late 2006. Google Docs and Spreadsheets also proved a convenient and popular way of saving word processed and numerical data online.
Last year Google expanded the coverage of several of their existing services. AdSense for mobile was also launched, allowing publishers to generate revenue from mobile browsing visitors to their site. Docs was expanded to include slide presentation functionality akin to Microsoft PowerPoint. The introduction of Street View allowed web users a three dimensional view of some sections of Google Maps.
This year has seen Google's first advance into the software market with the introduction of the Chrome web browser.
Wow... I wish the last ten years had been as exciting for me!
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