1998: Google First Incorporated - Pivotal Moments
Welcome to our tenth Pivotal Moments blog. If you follow us on social media, you'll know what this is all about. To paraphrase Confucius, it's only by knowing where we've been that we can understand where we're going.
“Study the past if you would divine the future.”
—Confucius
There are few corners of the globe where Google isn’t a household name. It's not just a name; it’s also a verb, meaning to look something up using the Google online search engine.
But like many Pivotal Moments in the history of technology, Google has a classic story of hard work, perseverance and a little luck. It's nothing short of inspiring.
A leader in the digital and technological fields, Google is one of the wealthiest companies in the world and an innovator and leader for the rest of us. With an admirable mission statement (“don’t be evil”) and a billion users, Google's story is one that we can learn from even today, well after the company’s 20th anniversary.
With a Google mindset, we can grow and push boundaries. But the company started out small and humble, as they often do.
Early Years
PHOTOGRAPH: KIM KULISH/GETTY IMAGES
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin pose with smiles and folded arms in front of yellow, Google-branded servers and Google signs.
Stanford University, 1995. A student, Larry Page, was considering taking up a placement at the school. But before he committed, he wanted to have a look around. Sergey Brin, already a student there, was assigned to give him the grand tour, and when the two men met, they immediately disagreed on pretty much everything they discussed.
It doesn’t sound like the ideal origin story… but a year later, they were working together to build a search engine. Originally designed to rank and determine the importance of web pages online, the pair initially named the search engine Backrub—not quite the name we all know today.
Thankfully, it was quickly renamed after a “googol”, the term for the number 1 when followed by 100 zeros. They found the term in a book of mathematics. This was an apt name for the founders, considering how much information they were designing their search engine to sift through.
The system the pair of grad students worked on was unique, using a technology they developed themselves called PageRank. This tech analysed a website’s relevance by considering:
The number of pages on the site
The importance of the pages
And whether they linked back to the original site
Before this, search engines ranked results based on the number of times a search term appeared on any given site. Remember when websites were utterly stuffed with keywords that made them unreadable garbage? You can thank the early search engines for that and Google for changing the game.
Given the brilliant reviews that Google received, even early in its development (while still under the moniker of Backrub), Page and Brin threw themselves into the project. It wasn’t long before they’d built their server using computer parts from wherever they could get them. They even maxed out credit cards to buy enormous amounts of disk space as cheaply as possible.
The Pivotal Moment
The Google sign on a sunny day in front of the famous Google Building 111, based at 111 W Java Dr, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, in the United States
By August 1998, Google was wowing curiosity in demonstrations, leading Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim to write a cheque for $100k. Unfortunately, the cheque was made to Google Inc., a non-existent company.
It forced Page and Brin to run around setting up the corporation just to be able to cash in, but luckily for the rest of us, it didn’t take them too long. By September 4th 1998, Google was officially an honest company. And their incorporation and initial $100,000 meant they had the means to raise more money. $900,000 more, to be exact.
With the funds they needed to kickstart the project, Page and Brin could open their first office in California, launching Google.com as a beta test that answered around 10,000 queries daily.
Finally, in 1999, Google could officially remove the “beta” from their title.
How Google Grew
Google website application open on a modern Apple laptop, outdoors in the snow to demonstrate that users can search from anywhere
Even as a search engine, Google was already an impressive piece of tech. Unconventional from the start, the company continued to hold on to its innovative, push-the-boundaries outlook to grow and develop into the worldwide name it is today.
In 2001, Larry Page was listed as the inventor of PageRank when Google filed for a patent for the technology. This was around the time the company went genuinely public, and many people were worried that the culture at Google might change as it grew.
To honour the company’s commitment to staying objective and sticking to its values, Google created the Chief Culture Officer role to keep them in check.
The company grew massively, quickly introducing product after product, many of which we still use. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Chrome were all released in succession as the company acquired other platforms like YouTube and expanded. One monumental move was exploring the mobile phone sector, leading to the creation of Android, a Google-run phone operating system.
By 2015, Google had restructured and had several divisions under the name of Alphabet, a vast conglomerate. Founders Brin and Page took on the roles of President and CEO, respectively.
How is Google still relevant?
Google Pixel branded devices laid out neatly including the flagship Pixel Phone, Google Buds and the Google Pixel Watch in various shades
The harder-to-answer question is how Google is still relevant.
Despite their small-time origins, they’re still one of the biggest companies in the world. And they’re constantly pushing ahead and releasing new tech and software regularly.
Creating Google AdWords (now Google Ads) and pay-per-click (PPC) services was a huge addition. It changed how we use and attempt to rank on Google for average users, personal brands, and huge companies. Digital marketing and search engine optimisation have become essential art forms, changing the face of the digital world entirely.
Flash Forward
In 2004, Google launched Google Scholar to index entire sections of scholarly literature, making them available worldwide for free. A year later, Google Maps was created—which many of us use daily to travel around the country and the world. Google Earth was followed soon after, followed by Google Analytics, which is all tools we use on a personal and professional level daily.
Once Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, the company tried to organise the world’s data with Google Calendar, Google Finance, and Google Trends. Then, in 2006, they released Google Translate to break language barriers worldwide.
In 2007, Google was ranked as the top company to work for—the same year, the company did it again, releasing Google Streetview and Android.
2009 Google introduced Google Voice, and in 2011, Google Flights. In 2014, Google introduced Google Classroom, which was designed to simplify file sharing and grading between students and teachers. Later, the service was improved by integrating it with Google Calendar and Google Meet. In 2015, we got Google Photos, which allows us to store images online for free. In 2016, there was Google Home.
Google Street View vehicle fitted with special 360 camera equipment to capture the interactive street maps, now found within the Google Maps app
Always look to evolve and as a progression in the maps technology, Google famously sends drivers around the world with special cameras attached to cars to capture content for Google Street View; this adds new dimensions to maps, allowing users to walk through their Google Maps and get a better perspective.
While continuing to release incredible new services, products, and technology, Google has remained transparent throughout. It is working to improve the world with investments in renewable energy and self-driving cars.
All in all, it’s hard to keep track of Google and its many achievements these days. But if we can say one thing for sure, it’s that they’re not going anywhere. They might even have released something new before this post goes live!
A well put together video showcasing The Invention and History of Google by Discovery UK