Advertisement

Article

Google celebrates 15 years of organizing the world’s information

Google celebrates 15 years of organizing the world’s information
Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

  • Updated:

It’s hard to believe the search giant is only 15 years old today. Designed by two brilliant students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, created one of the most iconic names in Silicon Valley.

In September 1998 Brin and Page, who were still computer science students at Stanford University, opened up a bank account in the name of their newly founded company. Their startup was called Google Inc., a name derived from the mathematical term that refers to a number expressed with 1 followed by 100 zeros.

first google logo

On August 30th, 1998 marked the  first ever Google Doodle, drawn for the Burning Man Festival. Even in its infancy, Google managed to be listed as one of PC Magazine’s 100 Top Web Sites and search engines of 1998.

burning man google doodle

The company then established their headquarters in Mountain View, California and celebrated launching AdWords in October of 2002. The early years of Google were marked by a constant explosion of innovation and bold choices. Still, employees of the company made time to have fun, creating the first April Fools prank that Google is now known for. The prank was for a mind reading tool called the MentalPlex.

mentalplex

In 2001, Google launched Image Search, one of the most used Google services today. Google’s index of web pages grew to over 3 billion that year and became the first search engine in Latin America.

In 2004, Google went public with an initial public offering of $1.9 billion. Google’s stock currently sells for almost $880 per share with a market cap of $292.62 billion. The company continued its world domination by opening offices in Tokyo, Sydney, and Dublin. The same year on April 1st (April Fools Day), Google released Gmail, which is now one of the most popular email services in the world.

Google Dublin atrium

In 2005, Google launched Maps, Earth, Analytics, Calendar, and Docs. A year later, the company purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. The purchase turned out to be a great idea as YouTube is now the third most trafficked sites on the internet, behind Google and Facebook.

YouTube header

Then in 2008, Google Chrome was born along with Google’s first version of Android, Android 1.5 “Cupcake”. Today, Android is the most popular mobile operating system with an 80% market-share.

Of course, things weren’t always successful for the big G. In 2011, Google tried to wage war against Facebook by launching its own social network, Google+. To this day, Facebook is still the dominant social networking site with 819 million monthly active users at the time of this writing.

flat google logo

Today, Google looks toward the future with Glass, a wearable device that pairs with your phone to provide a heads-up display of useful information.

What does Google have in store for us? Only time will tell.

Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

Latest from Lewis Leong

Editorial Guidelines