Google is celebrating its 12th birthday this September. Here is a timeline of the search giant's rise and rise from a garage in Silicon Valley to stratospheric success.
Summer 1995 Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford, when the 23-year-old Brin was assigned to show 24-year-old Page around the campus. They do not particularly hit it off, but Page joins the university as a computer science graduate student.
January 1996 Page and Brin, now both computer science graduate students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub which operates on Stanford servers for more than a year, eventually taking up too much bandwidth.
September 1997 Google.com is registered as a domain after the pair decide BackRub needs to be rebranded. The new name is a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. It is an early hint at their mission to organise a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
November 1997 The pair publish an early academic paper setting out Google's aims and specifications. It is called
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of the erstwhile computer firm Sun Microsystems, becomes the first investor in Google when he writes a cheque for $100,000 to an entity that does not yet exist - a company called Google Inc.
The
first review of Google by the search engine analyst Danny Sullivan on the website
SearchEngineWatch.com notes “I think many people will be pleased” with their Google search results.
September 1998 Google sets up its first office in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, now the company’s vice president of product management, at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.
Google files for incorporation in California. Shortly afterwards, Brin and Page open a bank account in the newly established company’s name and deposit Bechtolsheim’s cheque.
Craig Silverstein, a fellow computer science graduate student at Stanford, is hired as Google's first employee.
December 1998 PC Magazine reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognises it as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
February 1999 Google finally outgrows its garage office and moves to a new headquarters at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. By now, the company has eight employees. The first snack to be offered in Google's offices - which become famous for their lavish cuisine - is Swedish Fish.
March 1999 The first-ever company ski trip takes place when staff pile into a van and head for Tahoe, California. The “winter trip” has since become an annual tradition.
May 1999 Omid Kordestani becomes the first non-engineering employee when joins as employee number 11 to run the company's sales division. In 2010, he remains a senior advisor to the CEO and founders.
June 1999 John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board. The company secures its first major investment from venture capital firms when it receives $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
The funding is announced in the company's first press release, which quotes Moritz describing “Googlers” as “people who use Google” - the first hint that "to google" will pass into the lexicon as a verb.
August 1999 Google moves yet again, this time into its first Mountain View offices. The building is a few miles south of Stanford University, and north of the older towns of Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose.
November 1999 Charlie Ayers joins as Google’s first chef - continuing the emerging tradition of fine dining at work. He wins the job in a cook-off judged by the company’s 40 employees. His previous claim to fame is catering for the band Grateful Dead.
Ayers instigates Seafood Friday - serving a smorgasbord of seafood from oysters to lobster on the final day of every working week at Charlie’s Café in the Mountain View office.
Google adds the Uncle Sam function, which restricts a search to US government documents.
April 2000 Google's first April Fool's hoax comes with the announcement of MentalPlex - a function which reads your mind as you visualise the search results you want.
May 2000 The first 10 foreign language versions of Google are released in French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
Google wins its first Webby Awards for Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples’ Voice (voted by users).
June 2000 Google forges a partnership with Yahoo!, becoming their default search provider. It becomes the world’s largest search engine, with an index of one billion pages.
September 2000 The search engine is launched in Japanese and Korean as well as Chinese - beginning a fraught relationship between Google and China.
October 2000 Google AdWords launches with 350 customers. The programme allows companies to market their services by allowing them to buy the most popular and relevant search terms.
December 2000 Google Toolbar is released - a browser plug-in that allows users to search without visiting the Google homepage.
February 2001 Google's first public acquisition is Deja.com’s Usenet Discussion Service: an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. The company adds search and browse features and launches it as Google Groups.
March 2001 Eric Schmidt, a former director of Apple, is named chairman of the board of directors. The search engine is now available in 26 languages. The Google logo is centred on the page.
July 2001 Google Image Search launches, offering access to 250 million images.
August 2001 Google opens its first international office, in Tokyo. Eric Schmidt becomes CEO, while Page and Brin are named presidents of products and technology respectively.
October 2001 The search engine makes its first foray into South America in a partnership with Universo Online (UOL) that makes Google the major search service for millions of Latin Americans.
December 2001 Google's index size grows to three billion web pages.
February 2002 AdWords is overhauled and begins to be charged per click.
April 1 2002 Google announces that pigeons power its search results.
May 2002 Google announces a major partnership with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com.
Google Labs is launched, allowing users to try out beta technologies fresh from the company's research and development team.
September 2002 Google News launches with 4000 news sources. The service grew out of the 20 per cent initiative, by which engineers are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their time working on something that is not their main project. Google Mail also grew out of this practice.
October 2002 Google opens its first first Australian office in Sydney.
December 2002 Froogle launches, allowing users to search for products to buy. It is later renamed Google Product Search.
January 2003 The American Dialect Society recognises “google” as the “most useful” Word of the Year for 2002.
March 2003 Googe AdSense launches, offering a new content-targeted service enabling publishers to access the company's vast network of advertisers.
April 2003 The company launches its in-kind advertising programme for non-profit organisations,
Google Grants.
December 2003 Google Print (which later becomes
Google Book Search) is launched, indexing small excerpts from books to appear in search results. The company's headcount has reached 1,628.
February 2004 Page is inducted into the
National Academy of Engineering.
Google's search index reaches six billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images.
March 2004 The company moves to its new “Googleplex” at
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View - providing a campus environment for its 800 plus US employees.
Google Local is introduced, offering local area business listings, maps and directions. It is later combined with
Google Maps.
"Microkitchens" in every Google office are filled with snacks and often an espresso machine. Page and Brin made it a “rule” that no staff member should have to walk more than 100 feet for food.
April 2004 Google files with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which governs the financial dealings of public companies, for an Initial Public Offering in order to be able to sell shares on the stock market.
For April Fool's Day, the company announces plans to open the Googlunaplex, a new research facility on the Moon. Google Mail is launched the same day as an invitation-only service.
The Official Google Blog goes live.
August 2004 Google's Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares takes place on Wall Street, opening at $85 per share.
September 2004 Google services for Norway and Kenya become the 102nd and 103rd Google domains. The list eventually grows to more than 150.
October 2004 The search engine opens its European HQ in Dublin, Ireland, as well as engineering offices Bangalore and Hyderabad, India. Page and Brin are named Fellows by the Marconi Society, which recognises “lasting scientific contributions to human progress in the field of communications science and the Internet”.
The company acquires Keyhole, a digital mapping company whose technology will later become Google Earth. Google SMS launches, allowing users to send text search queries to GOOGL or 466453 from their mobiles. Google Desktop Search is also introduced, allowing users to search for files stored on their own hard drives using Google technology.
November 2004 Google's search index eaches eight billion. The company's headcount is now 3,021.
December 2004 The Google Print Programme (now Google Book Search) expands through digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and Oxford University plus the New York Public Library.
February 2005 Google Maps goes live. Image Search hits a new milestone when 1.1 billion images indexed.
April 1 2005 Google announces magical beverage, Google Gulp, that makes its imbibers more intelligent and therefore better able to use search results properly. Google Maps adds satellite views and directions, while Google Local goes mobile and includes SMS driving directions.
My Search History launches in Labs, allowing users to view all the web pages they have visited and Google searches they have made over time.
May 2005 Blogger Mobile is released, enabling bloggers to use their mobile phones to post and send photos to their blogs. Personalised Homepage (now iGoogle) is designed for people to customise their Google homepage.
June 2005 Google Mobile Web Search is released, specially formulated for viewing search results on mobile phones.
source:telegraph.co.uk
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