Seventeen years have passed since Google.com was registered as a domain name (September 15, 1997, to be exact).
The name was based on the world “googol,” the math term for a number with 100 zeros — meant to represent the founders’ mission to organize the data from the Web.
Like a stable of other startups, its first office was a garage in Menlo Park, California. By 1999, it had raised $25 million in equity funding. It then became the prince of Palo Alto, where — in part because of Google, in part because it became Silicon Valley’s ground zero — even a garage now costs at least a million or two. Today, Google has its own campus in Mountain View, California.
The digital marketing and SEO specialists at Fusion360 have created an interesting infographic detailing some dates for the company that grew to become a presence in everything we now do online.
Some highlights:
2000 – Google began selling AdWords as keywords related contextual advertising.
2002 – Google launched Google News Service.
2006 – Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion; in addition, the verb “to google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
2007 – Google maps received prime placement on the original iPhone.
2010 – Google nominated as World’s Most Attractive Employer to recent college graduates.
We can add this one: In 2012, Google began installing Google Fiber in Kansas City, providing Internet access that is 100 times faster than most broadband. Let us hope a future infographic shows that what happens in Kansas City doesn’t stay in Kansas City. Google is now working with 34 other cities across the country to implement Fiber.
Today, Google’s search index is more than 100 million gigabytes in size. It has photographed 5 million miles of road for Street View, and people have used YouTube to watch 450,000 years’ worth of YouTube videos each month.
The company that began as a simple search engine still shows no signs of slowing down.
