On September 27 this year, Google celebrated its 28th anniversary. Company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin Launched in 1998, it was born out of a university project that eventually turned its search engine into The leading portal for information on the Internet.
However, Google wasn’t always called Google. The direct predecessor of this search engine appeared at Stanford University in 1996 and was named BackRub, referring to the method used to analyze links to other pages and thereby determine their relevance. This work eventually became the basis for PageRank, a technology that made it possible to rank results differently than other search engines at the time.
From BackRub to Google and the checks that drive companies
The name change occurred in 1997. Page and Brin were looking for a word related to the large amount of information they planned to index, and came up with googol, a mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros. According to accounts maintained by Stanford University, Sean Anderson checked whether the domain name was available during a meeting to find the name, but He entered “google.com” incorrectly. Page likes This variant and domain name were registered on September 15, 1997.
The project continued to develop over the next few months and funding was soon needed. One of the defining moments occurred in 1998, when Andy BettlesheimThe co-founder of Sun Microsystems watched a demonstration of the search engine. After the speech, he decided to write a check $100,000 due to Google Inc.
There’s a problem: Google Inc. doesn’t legally exist yet. Page and Brin couldn’t deposit a check until the company was officially incorporated, so they had to complete the company creation process before using the investment. The donation is part of the initial funding for the project that will eventually leave the university setting.
Nor were the first servers and equipment installed at large technology headquarters. Google began using borrowed resources and computers assembled from parts provided by Stanford University, then moved its operations to a Garage in Menlo Park, CA. There, one of the company’s first offices began operations.
The central idea is to exploit the link structure of the network to obtain more relevant results. While many search engines at the time relied primarily on the occurrence of certain words on a page, The system developed by Page and Brin also takes into account which websites link to other websites and the importance of those links. This difference is one of the factors that allow search engines to gain users quickly.
over the years, Google is no longer just a search engine. The company has expanded its business with products such as Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, YouTube and cloud computing services, while the search engine remains one of its main products.
Its existence has even entered everyday language: “google” appears used as verb In English, refers to searching for information on the Internet, and was added to Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. In Spanish, the verb “googlear” has also become widely used, although the RAE recommends the adapted form “guglear”.
Twenty-eight years after Google was founded, this anniversary comes as artificial intelligence is increasingly integrated into its services. The journey began with BackRub, continued with a name born from the misspelling of googol, and gained momentum with a check that the founders couldn’t cash even before officially founding Google.