Google marks two decades in which it has gone from being the best way to explore the Internet to a search engine so intertwined in our daily lives that its name even became a verb: googling.
It all started when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford University(USA), known for its location near Silicon Valley, and they came up with a way to index and search the web efficiently.
His idea went beyond counting the number of keywords used, as the development of the software took into account factors such as the relationships between web pages to help determine where they should rank in search results, whether it was in the first positions. or in the last.
Thus, the official launch of Google took place in September 1998 in a rented garage in the city of Menlo Park, northern California. The name chosen was a creation on the mathematical term “googol”, which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
According to the story, Google ran for a time on servers hosted at Stanford, where a version of the search engine had been tested.Later, it moved its headquarters to Mountain View, also in California, where it remains its headquarters.
2004 marked an important date in the life of Google, as the company went public in August 2004, with shares priced at $ 85. Interestingly, the same Google shares are now trading above $ 1,000. With the time of Google Gmail, Maps, the Chrome browser or the Android mobile operating system also emerged.
Google also manufactures smartphones or smartphones with Integrated Android system: the Google Pixels that dominate the market along with the other big phone companies such as Samsung or Apple.
Meanwhile, it also bought the YouTube video platform in 2006 in a deal valued at $ 1.65 billion, an amount that seemed astronomical at the time and has proven to be an excellent exercise in foresight.
Although not everything has been positive. They have also had some punctures, such as Google Glass or the social network Google+ itself that was launched to compete directly with Facebook and has not had much real impact.
However, the progress of the company is undeniable. In the second quarter of 2018, Google submitted a profit report of 3.2 billion despite the fine of more than 5 billion dollars imposed by the European Union.
