Google Inc. turns 10 today - Happy birthday! ... UPDATED

by Tony Austin

Monday, 08 September 2008

Google was conceived by its two founders in the mid-1990s. But if you accept the date of incorporation as its birthday then today, 7th September 2008, is the 10th birthday of this amazing company.

You could probably sau that it was in the mid-1990s that the Internet began to take off.

The fundamental structure, architected in the two previous decades, was beginning to gain some real flesh. Gradually more and more people started logging in to the Internet starting around 1991 or 1992, mainly for looking at static web pages and sending messages.

Mosaic browser appeared in 1993, and its ease of use introduced most early Internet users to the joys of web browsing. Then Netscape launched its Navigator browser in 1994, and most of us switched across to this to surf the web.

Then Microsoft got into the act with the spectacular release of Windows 95 (in 1995 of course), with its embedded Internet Explorer browser which soon saw to the demise of Netscape's browser as a force. IE managed to build up to around a 90 percent browser share by the turn of the century, not to be challenged until Firefox browser appeared on the scene.

Wikipedia has a concise summary of the web search engine and you'll see that they didn't really start appearing until the early 1990s. As Wikipedia mentions, it started with Archie, then along came Gopher and Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, AlltheWeb, AltaVista. Yahoo and quite a few others.

I was familiar with the names of all these, even if I didn't do more than play with a few of them. Back then, I used Yahoo! search most of the time. Appearing around late 1998 was Google search engine, and somehow it appealed to people and started becoming very popular by 2000/2001, since then rising to predominance as we all know, to the extent that that the expression "to Google" is widely used in its own right!

And then there are all the other Google offerings, including wildly popular services like Blogger, gMail, Google Maps, and quite a few more.

I was going to write more, but don't see the need after coming across this elegant piece by iQuantum: The little engine that could (and did) change the world

Read some more facts about various Google sites Company Overview, Google Australia timeline, and Google milestones.

In April 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin present their seminal paper "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" at the 7th International Conference on the World Wide Web in Brisbane, Australia. They publicly demonstrate a search engine they call "Google".

Read some more Google facts at places like Company Overview, Google Australia timeline, and Google milestones.

Since Google Inc. was incorporated on 7th September 1998, I reckon that today is as good as any to pick as their 10th birthday.

UPDATE:
From unknown to a household name in their first decade, that's impressive! It will be just as fascinating to see where Google finishes up after another ten years.

But maybe there'll be equally dramatic change sooner than that. The following must-watch YouTube video forecasts earth-shattering change as early as the year 2014: EPIC - Evolving Personalized Information Construct.