Google is the most visited website on the Internet – so much so that the phrase ‘to google’ has evolved into an intransitive verb! Every day billions of users rely upon Google for information and advice. Google is so popular that it processes 3.5 billion searches every day! In the present day, it is difficult to imagine life without it.
So how did this mega-search monster materialize? The story of Goggle began in 1998 when two graduate students at Stanford University in California – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – created an algorithm to solve a computer task. They found that it ended up searching all the hypertext documents available in cyberspace related to the query. This prompted them to come up with the idea of creating a search tool that would list relevant Web pages by analysing backlinks in a hypertext document. They initially named this tool ‘backrub’ because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
The search engine soon proved more successful than anything they could have dreamed of, and was renamed ‘Google’. Google launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005 and Google Chrome in 2008, in addition to many other services and products. In 2015 Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet.
Picture Credit : Google
