Google is celebrating its 25th birthday on Wednesday, 27 September 2023.
The world’s most popular search engine originated as a research endeavor undertaken by Larry Page and Sergey Brin during their doctoral studies at Stanford University in the late 1990s.
From the confines of their dorm rooms, the duo devised a groundbreaking search algorithm, which they coined as PageRank. This innovation revolutionized the way websites were ranked, shifting the focus to the number of incoming links. PageRank proved to be significantly more effective than existing algorithms, propelling Google to the pinnacle of web search engines in record time.
While Google Inc. was officially incorporated on September 4, the company observes September 27 as its symbolic birthday, commemorating a pivotal milestone in the number of web pages indexed by its search engine.
In recent times, Google has maintained an extraordinary global market share, hovering around the impressive figure of 92 percent. In stark contrast, its closest rival, Bing, commands a mere 3 percent market share, while Yahoo lags behind with just over 1 percent.
The nomenclature of Google draws its inspiration from the mathematical concept of a “googol,” representing the colossal number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This choice of nomenclature aptly mirrors the founders’ vision to systematically structure vast troves of information.
Over time, the Google search engine has evolved into an indispensable facet of our everyday life, profoundly influencing the manner in which we explore, communicate, and engage with online information.
In a significant testament to its cultural impact, in 2006, the Oxford Dictionary officially incorporated the word “google” as a verb, signifying the act of searching for information on the internet, irrespective of the search engine employed.
