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• Posted Sept. 4, 2014, 8 a.m. - 10 years, 3 months ago

Google founded September 4th 1998

Today, Google is the most widely used search engine, with users the world over utilising it as their portal in the web. The 4th of September 2014 marks sixteen years since the company was founded, so we thought we’d explore just how it came to be…

 

Google was created by two PhD students at the renowned Stanford University. Larry Page had already began work on his dissertation, examining how the web could be perceived as a ‘graph’ when he was joined by friend Sergey Brin as he two collaborated on the Stanford Digital Library Project. With the aim of making an integrated and universal digital library, the project was proving a challenge even to some of the most talented students in the world. What was needed was a new way of determining site relevance for searches. Page came up with the notion that the best way to gauge just how useful a site could be is to examine how many links were placed to them by similar sites. This became the basis of the PageRank scale used to allocate search positions. Page and Brin set out to create the programming required to rank sites, and ‘BackRub’ was born.

 

Originally available from google.stanford.edu, the domain for the search engine, Google.com was registered in September 1997. Just under a year later, Page and Brin incorporated Google as a company. Over the years that followed, the search engine grew in size and reputation, eventually surpassing older providers.

 

Since, Google has only continued to grow in size and reach. The company now has seventy offices in over forty countries around the world and its projects, such as Street View, are internationally famed. Rapidly adapting to the mobile internet market, Google is as determined as ever before to help users access the information that they want, when they want – just as its creators desired.

 

Image: http://bit.ly/1rnu3jo

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