Google

1997

Started as a project by students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in America. They originally worked on a search engine called the BlackRub, which was a search engine used for students at the university

Google’s name comes from the word googol, which refers to the number one followed by one hundred zeroes. It was suppose to represent their organise an infinite amount of information on the web.

1998

They set up their workspace in a garage in a woman’s house. It not has offices all over the world with over 450,000 servers world wide.

The logo was only put on the homepage when they found that early users were confused when only presented with a blank page and a box. Some typed in the box ‘what do I do now’ as the web page confused them.

1999

They move to a bigger space but still have only eight employees. By the end of the year the company has 40 employees

2000

They began what has began a tradition of releasing announcing April Fools day hoaxes. They claim to have invented the programme MentalPlex which claims to be able to read your mind and search what you were thinking.

They beginning working with Yahoo and become their default search engine.

By May the goggle homepage is available in 10 different languages and by September this is increased to 15. Today it is available in 88.

This is the year that they become the worlds largest search engine.

2001

Image search launches with access to 250 million images.

2002

Partnership with AOL begins.

They launch Google Labs, which is ideas created by their team. Employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their day working on their own projects. This has resulted in programmes such as Google news and Orkut, a social networking site.

2003

Launch Google print where you can search small extracts of books.

2004

They now have access to 4.28 billion web pages by November this increases to 8 billion.

2005

Google Earth

Blogger Mobile: allows bloggers to upload photos and posts from their mobile phones to blogs

Blog Search: allows you to search relevant and up to date blog postings.

Google Talk is launched. Allows you to instant message friends.

Google Maps begins

2006

Google news for mobile launches.

Launch Google Calendar. Can share and update calendar with friends.

Release Google trends which allows people to see the popularity of topics.

Google Book Search allows people to download books in the public domain.

Oxford dictionary adds ‘Google’ as a word.

2007

Google Street view begins in America.

The Queen launches the royal you tube page. She is the first monarch to do so.

2008

Google translate adds ten more languages

2009

The Vatican launches their own You Tube channel

New Google Earth provides a 3D look at the ocean floor.

2010

They acquire Picnik, which allows you to edit photos.

Google Apps Market place is launched. It is an online marketplace for business apps.

TODAY

It receives over a billion a day, from all around the world including Antarctica.

Most goggle searches take less then half a minute to complete.

It has the largest network of translators in the world.

Google