Today, September 27, marks Google’s 25th birthday; it is worthwhile to look back at its humble beginnings.
How it started?
Sergey Brin and Larry Page initially met in January 1997 at Stanford University. This interaction happened when Sergey Bin who was a PhD student at the university, was asked to show Larry Page around campus and thus Google’s journey began. They started a research project initially called “BackRub,” which eventually turned into the search engine we now know as Google.
Their idea caught the attention of significant Silicon Valley investors, and in the month of August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystem offered Sergey Brin and Larry Page a $100,000 cheque, and Google Inc. was officially formed. With this vital investment, the newly formed crew moved from their dormitories to their first place of employment, which happened to be a garage suburbs of California.
The initial journey
When Google became the default search engine for Yahoo in 2000, its standing in the computer business grew. AdWords launched in October 2000, establishing the foundation for Google’s supremacy in internet advertising. The next significant breakthrough took place in 2004, when Google announced that Gmail will offer 1GB of storage space, so solidifying Gmail as a vital part of our lives and helping to fight back competition from the likes of YahooMail and Microsoft’s Hotmail. The following August, the company went public.
Google’s Android and YouTube
Google’s creativity did not end with search and email. It entered the mobile market in 2005 with the acquisition of Android and the introduction of Google Talk. Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 marked the company’s foray into the online video industry.
Google’s purchase frenzy continued in 2007 with the acquisition of DoubleClick, which increased its prominence in internet advertising. The introduction of universal search in 2007 allowed users to access a wide range of material kinds in a single search.
Google released its first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, in 2008, along with the Chrome web browser. The years that followed witnessed the introduction of Google Glass, the acquisition of mapping firm Waze, and the formation of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, with Sundar Pichai as CEO.
Future plans: BARD
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, shared his thoughts on the company’s future, particularly its plans with AI, in a blog post. AI is one of the biggest opportunities Google is trying to tap into and it is already among the top names in this field. The next 25 years could demand even more innovation and impact from Google to retain its top spot.
February 2023 Google announces Bard, a generative AI-powered chatbot that can produce text content and fetch information off the internet. However, a factual error in the AI tool’s demo tanks. Alphabet shares, erasing $100 billion from the company’s market capitalization. In March 2023 the it started rolling out Bard to some users.
More on Google’s journey: https://newswaves24.com/web-stories/googles-25th-birthday-the-tech-giants-journey