• Google is a revolutionary search engine founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
• Google has been consistently expanding its services and acquiring companies worth an estimated $1 trillion dollars today.
• The company has made improvements such as rich results, cognitive site search service, and voice search commands to optimize their searches.
• With its ever-growing influence, Google remains one of the most used search engines in the world.
It’s hard to imagine a world without Google. The search engine has become so ubiquitous that it’s been around forever. Billions of people use it daily, but how did it reach this popularity? How did Google become the most popular search engine in the world? Here’s a look back at the history of Google and see how it all began.
The History of Google
Google is considered to be the most reliable search engine in the world. Here’s how it started:
Google Origins
It all started in 1995 when two Stanford Ph.D. students, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, developed a new way of searching the internet—one that was much more effective than existing methods. Their algorithm gave more accurate results by looking for keywords on web pages rather than simply counting how many times a word appeared on a page as other search engines did at the time. This revolutionary approach made their search engine stand out from its competitors and quickly gained traction among internet users.
The Birth of Google
In 1998, Page and Brin founded the company now known as Google Inc., which family and friends initially funded before eventually receiving investments from venture capitalists such as Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.
The company’s name is derived from “googol”—the mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100—which reflects their mission to provide comprehensive information about any topic imaginable to anyone who searches for it online.
Google Growth & Expansion
From there, Google continued to grow rapidly, expanding its services beyond simple web searches to include things like Gmail (2004), Google Maps (2005), YouTube (2006), and Android (2007).
The company also acquired dozens of other companies over the years, including DoubleClick (2008) and Waze (2013). Today, Google is one of the largest companies in the world, with an estimated worth of over $1 trillion dollars. Its products are used by millions of people every day and have become some of the most popular services on the web.
Improvements in Google
Google is improving its functionality every year. Here are some new improvements known in the platform.
Rich Results
One of the most significant recent changes you may have noticed when using Google is the addition of rich results. These are enhanced search results that contain images, videos, maps, recipes, reviews, and more.
Rich results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results and offer searchers more detailed information than traditional text-based links. To get your website featured in rich results, you’ll need to ensure your content is marked up with structured data so that it’s easier for Google to understand what your site is about and how best to display it in search.
Additionally, you can use services to get your website on top of the results. A cognitive site search service can help you provide relevant results and get your website on the first page. This service looks into your user’s needs and provides the necessary changes to your website. This can make your website more relevant to searches done by your chosen demographic.
Google Ads
Another way you can utilize Google’s improvements is by taking advantage of its advertising services. Recently, Google has been pushing its Ads platform as an effective way for businesses to target potential customers online.
With Ads, you can create ads explicitly tailored for different audiences by targeting based on location, interests, searches, and other factors. Plus, with ads powered by machine learning algorithms, your campaigns are automatically optimized to reach as many people as possible while still staying within budget.
Voice Search
Finally, one of the most significant changes that Google has made recently was adding support for voice search commands. This allows users to ask questions naturally without typing exact keywords into their search bar. And since voice searches are becoming increasingly popular due to advances in artificial intelligence technology and natural language processing algorithms, being able to optimize your content around these types of queries can help ensure that you’re reaching potential customers who prefer this method of searching over typing out their queries into a text box.
For more than two decades, Google has been at the forefront of innovation and is a leader in search engine technology. Its products have become staples in modern life, and its influence grows as it expands into new markets. With all these changes over the years, it’s no wonder why Google remains one of the most used search engines in the world.
