Google celebrates 10th Birthday – Small story

Google is one of the most inspiring and best grown website on the web, which is nearly similar to the homepage which was 10 years ago, when launched. But just the homepage is nothing to care about, as the services by Google are just awesome and one of the most appreciated all over the web. It is the 2nd most visited website, after Yahoo as seen in Alexa.

Now Google is celebrating its 10th birthday, not actually a day as Google itself isn’t sure about the exact day of its launch. So entire september is Good for them, but the logo today seen on their homepage makes me write about it. After all, 10 years is nothing little.

They have presented a timeline explaining everything about the 10 years spent by their team, which am shortening for those who want to read it.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met each other in Stanford Univ. in Summer of 1995. Then in January 1996, they worked together to bring in Backrub.
That stated,

BackRub is a “web crawler” which is designed to traverse the web.

15 September 1997, the date when Google.com was registered as a domain name because they both felt that BackRub needs a new name, and Google was derived from Googol which means a mathematical term with 1 followed by 100 zeros(A geeky decision right?)

In 1998, the design was worked on, and rented a work space, tried for relevancy of the search results and in the same year, Google was named as the “Top Search Engine” by PC magazine.

On 26 August 1999, Google’s office is finally shifted to “Mountain View” which is a few miles away from Stanford University, and still its office is at the same place. And by now, many good employees were added into the team.

On 9 May 2000, the first 10 language versions of Google.com are released: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. On 26 June, Yahoo!(the currently most popular website on the web) came into an agreement with Google, in which it was decided that Google would be the default search and complement to Yahoo’s directory and search index. The same year, Google won the Webby Awards!
Soon Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages were added in, and total number of languages increased to 15.

First April Fool’

s joke by Google – They introduced MentalPlex.

Google’

s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. And many Googlers might have got fooled with that.

23 October 2000 – Google adwords was launched.
11 December 2000 – Google toolbar was released.

26 March 2001, Eric Schmidt, the name which still prevails in the Google top team, was named as the Chairman or board of directors. Then later on 6 August 2001, he was named as the CEO for Google while Larry Page became the president for Products, and Sergey Brin the president for Technology.
27 March 2001, Google became more vocal with its database including 26 languages now.

What other things happened between 2001 and 2002 -
Google image search was launched in Mid-2001, and the first International office of Google was opened at Tokyo. Google labs were opened in Mid-2002.
In September 2002, Google news was opened. In october, Google opened an office in Australia and in December, its product search called Froogle came into existence.

In 2003, Pyra Labs, the one behind blogger.com was acquired by Google and so Blogger platform was under Google. Then adsense, grants and Google print were released.

In 2004 – The social networking website Orkut was released, and Google local search engine also was launched. Soon the official Google blog was opened, and on April Fool’s day, Gmail was launched.
In the later months, Google had setup European headquarters in Dublin, and some engineering workspaces in India. At the same time, 3 new services were opened – Google Product search, Google SMS and Google Scholar.

Launches in 2005 – Google Maps, Google Code, Google Maps in U.K., Site targeting option in Adwords advertising service, blogger mobile, iGoogle, Google Earth, Google Talk and Mobile Web Search.
In late 2005, Google blog search, Google reader, Google analytics, Gmail for mobile were launched.

In 2006 – Early – Picasa came in with 25 languages, Google news in mobile and option for chatting with email came into existence. Google finance, calender and Maps in U.K. were also introduced. Google trends came in, and Gmail was expanded for 40 languages.
Late - Google gave the Wi-Fi service in the whole Mountain View city place with their servers, and then took over JotSpot and Youtube. And Google docs were released.

In 2007, Gmail which was a invite-only feature, was opened for all. There was no invite required since then. Google hot trends, Google street view for Maps and Google gears were introduced. Later, Adsense for Mobile, OpenSocial and the android mobile platform were released.

During this year, i.e. 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick, and then released Google Sites, Website Optimizer, FriendConnect, Google Suggest and it’s Google chrome browser was released. Many other advancements were done this year.
They are also working on the 10 to the 100th project.

So these were just the things what Google introduced etc. but there were a lot more things done by them, especially in the past couple of years.

Anyways happy 10th birthday Google.