Yesterday September 28th was Google’s 13th birthday. Yesterday’s doodle hinted at a little more than previous years. Sure the Google logo was there, but you will also notice (as a blast from the past) that there was an exclamation point following it. For those that didn’t know this was actually part of their original emblem (which they ditched in 1999).
I thought some would like a brief history of Google (to help them celebrate a little)
1997 – www.Google.com was registerd as a domain name on September 15, 1997
1998 – Google the company was incorporated until Sept. 4, 1998. Like most other High-Tech companies, Google was started in a garage by two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with $100,000 in seed money from Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
1999 – Google’s lifetime in the garage was short and by June 1999 Google had moved twice and already secured $25 million for operations
2000 – In 2000 the company started taking off when a rival (Yahoo!) announced it would be using Google’s search engine for it’s site, hit the 100 million search queries, and launched it’s AdSense program.
2001 – In 2001 Google went global opening an office in Tokyo and it eleced a new chairman of the board, Eric Schmidt (who them became the CEO). Additionally Google began searching Images
2002 – Marked the begginings of Google Labs, Google News, and Froogle (shopping engine)
2003 – Google branched into Blogging with it’s acquisition of Pyra Labs, enable Google Book Search (then called Google Print). Additionally lexicographers recognized a new verb “to google”
2004 – Google reached 8 billion items in it’s indexes, moved into Googleplex (it’s new location, and launced Gmail.
2005 – Google moved into the maps world, iGoogle, Google Reader (RSS) and Google Analystics. Additionally they started into the mobile world with mobile versions of Gmail, Blogger, and Search.
2006 – The purchase of YouTube, expansion and Google Maps to include stret level, and expanded the audience of Google Docs and Gmail to more global regions
2008 – Google enters the Mobile wars and Browser wars with Android, and chrome.
2009 – Chrome OS was launched to “round out” the offerings of the company
2010 – Google could be considerd an entity to compete against, and the number of seuts against them for things about developments, privacy issues, WiFi scandals etc happened.
2011 – Google enters an agreement to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and pays $500 million to the US Government to settle a case involving the importation of illegal prescription drugs into the United States.
Over the last 13 years, Google has it’s best to live up to it’s moto “Don’t be evil.” True a few mistakes along the way, but also a lot of progression and contributions to the world as we know it today!