Google, the Search Giant is celebrating its 18th birthday! Let's have a look at Google history.

Google started its journey as a Search engine as a result of a university project by Larry Page and Surgy Brin at Stanford University in 1996. At that time, search engines ranked search results by the amount of times the search terms were appeared on the page. Larry and Surgy designed a new search algorithm that determine a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site. They named this algorithm "PageRank". Using this algorithm they developed a search engine which was known as "BackRub". Later they named the search engine "Google" misspelling the word "googol (i.e. the number one followed by one hundred zeros)". This gives the meaning that Google is providing huge amount of information (and it really does!). Google was hosted initially under google.stanford.edu as a subdomain of official website of Stanford University. On September 15, 1997 Google was registered under google.com domain and on September 4, 1998 Google became a Incorporated Company.

Step by step Google developed its search algorithm and attracted millions of users becoming the best search engine of all time. Google's main revenue came from the advertisements displayed on the search results. This is what we call "Adsense". As you know Adsense displays ads relative to the search term.

While Google dominate the search engine market, Google start expanding its services launching Gmail in 2004 and Google Maps in 2005. Gmail and Google Maps became revolutionary products which are still popular among millions of internet users. Google purchased some companies to expand their business. Some were very successful and some didn't make any sense. (See the complete list of Google Mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet here.) Youtube which was acquired in 2006, is one of the successful acquisitions Google made. The best deal that Google ever made was the acquisition of Android on August 17, 2005.

Google Chrome Browser is another revolutionary product that Google developed, which became the popular browser in the world within a short period of time. Go Language founded by Google is a simple but great language that was invented in the past years.

The list of products and services that Google offers is very lengthy and can't mention in this post. Most of these products and services are offered free of charge. The influence Google made to the internet and the IT industry is remarkable. In 2015 Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. which is owned by Larry Page and Sergy Brin, who are the co-founders of Google. Google (Alphabet Inc.) is the second most valuable company in the world and the best place to work in the world!

Let's wish Google a very happy birthday!