Hurray! Google Celebrates Its 13th Anniversary

On Sunday, September 4, 2011, the search giant Google celebrated its 13th anniversary. ‘Google’ has already become a verb and the search engine is appreciated by billions of people worldwide.

It was on September 4, 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin received a $100,000 check from an investor and incorporated Google, Inc. to legally deposit the check. However everything started a bit earlier, in 1995, when the founders met at Stanford and decided to launch a search service called BackRub in January 1996. Soon the name and logo were changed to Google. With this name, the new corporation demonstrated its aim to create an infinite amount of web resources, as the name referenced to a play on the mathematical figure, ‘googol’ that represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

The founders stated that Google would never become a conventional company. Since then they have been proving the statement with constant innovations and original approaches. It reflects even in Googleplex interior and territory design featuring a dinosaur in the yard.

The first Google office was set in a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California and the first Google storage was made out of Lego.

After moving office in 1999 to Mountain View, California, in 2000 Google partnered with Yahoo to become its default search provider and in 2000 reached the 1 billion URL milestone, establishing itself as the world’s largest service engine. The same year the ad program AdWord was launched enabling keyword advertising with search results.

Google Image search followed in July 2001 with a catalog of a 250 million images and the content-targeted ad program AdSense came in 2003.

Gmail was presented on April Fool’s Day 2004. And in August Google’s initial public offerings had Class A common stock at $85 per share.

Google Maps came along in February 2005 and in June Google Earth was also launched. By 2006 Google acquired YouTube.

2007 marked the birth of the Android platform for mobile devices. The open source browser Chrome, which celebrated its third anniversary on September 1, was introduced in 2008.

In 2010 the Google Apps Marketplace, Google Buzz and Google TV were launched.

In June 2011 the corporation started inviting users to its social Google+ platform and later announced it acquires Motorola Mobility in a deal worth $12.5 billion.

The show goes on as Google continues to grow and develop making the world wonder what the technology brings in the future.