Hurray Google is 20 today, the 27th day of September 2018! According to Alexa , a company that monitors website traffic, Google is the most visited website in the world. This is absolutely true! There is hardly a day that passes that I don’t visit Google. I know this is also the case with many people. We live in a world where there is a huge craving for new information and search engines like Yahoo, AOL, Ask, Bing, Baidu and Google make it even easier to find new information at the comfort of our homes. According to Forbes, in May 2018, Google has a net worth of $132.1 Billion and it is listed as the world’s second most valuable brand in the world after Apple. How Google rose from a website formed at the dorm room of two PhD students at Stanford University in 1998 to become one of the world’s most significant companies offering a wide variety of products is simply amazing. Larry Page and Sergey Brin grew up in families that had good background in science and technology. Sergey’s father was a maths lecturer at the University of Maryland and his mother was a scientist at NASA. Larry’s father had a degree in computer science from the University of Michigan while his mother was a database consultant with a master’s degree in computer science. Therefore, before both of them met, they were already used to computer systems and database management. Previously, search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, however, Larry and Page thought about and then developed a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites which they called Page Rank. Page Rank was a system of determining a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site. Looking For Funds Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not actually found Google in order to build a business or a company. Their main drive and inspiration was to build a great PhD thesis. They formed a prototype of their search engine, called Back rub, and later renamed it Google in 1997. The term Google was actually a play on the word googol, a mathematical term for one followed by 100 zeros, which represented the vast amounts of data on the web. While on campus, the founders launched their invention on Stanford University’s intranet. This new search engine soon gained much popularity among the university environment via word- of- mouth recommendations, as users quickly discovered how faster and more relevant its search results were. The founders attempted to sell this new technology to Yahoo, Excite and Alta Vista which was the most popular search engine as at that time for about $1m. However, each of companies declined the offer. At that time , search for information and Google’s technology to produce search results in split seconds didn’t really present any attractive opportunity to revenue generation to advertisers. But then, the founders were very passionate that they had created a product that people truly needed, they were left with no option but to take the Google to the market themselves. In August 1998, Larry and Sergey met private investor Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who had earlier sold another business to Cisco for hundreds of millions of dollars. Bechtolsheim was fascinated with this new product that he wrote out a cheque of $100,000 on the spot in favour of Google Inc, compelling Larry and Sergey to incorporate the company. This became the birth of Google. The Company Today Today, with more 60,000 employees in 50 different countries, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people world-wide which includes: YouTube, Android Operating System, Android phones and tablets, Smartbox, , Google Search, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Chrome browser, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google calendar, Google Finance, Googleplex, Google plus, Google Drive, Google Fibre, Google Play, Google Translate, Google Store, Google Duo, Blogger and many other numerous products. Most of the things we do on the internet is controlled by Google and recently they started working on a project called the Google Self Driving Cars. In this project, cars will be automatically controlled by a software created by Google. The company is the world’s second most valuable brand after Apple and has a net worth of $132.1 Billion as at May 2018 and it continues to grow, increase in its innovation and new products and it keeps attracting the best minds in ICT across the world. Happy birthday once again to google for impacting the lives of many people around the world.
