Google

The search engine, Google, has transformed the way humans search for and receive knowledge. With the advent of Google, anything we question can be instantly answered. But, when did Google first start answering our biggest life's questions, and how did it become the major source of information it is today? Let's take a dive into the history of Google and how it has become what it is today.

Google first began in 1996, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to create a better way to organize search results on the internet. At the time, other search engines sorted results by counting the number of times a word appeared on a page. So, if you were searching for "butterflies" then websites that had the word butterflies written the most would get to the top of the search result. Page and Brin knew there had to be a better way, and thus the idea of Google was formed. Google, unlike other search engines, ordered results based on the importance of the page and relied on other people's use of that page to determine importance. So, if you were searching for "butterflies" then websites that people used most often regarding butterflies would come up first. This ensured that the top search engine results were the most useful, and not just the ones that used the word the most.

The advent of this new way of searching information immediately took off since it was vastly superior to the other search engines at the time. In 1999, three years after its creation, Google began selling advertisements that would appear in the search engine results. This helped the company grow even more than it already had and further ingrained its use into everyday life.

By the mid-2000s, over a billion searchers were being performed in Google on a daily basis, and the verb "to Google" had made it's way into the dictionary and popular culture. Just one decade after its creation, Google had permeated into the entire internet.

Once it achieved this major status, Google did not stop trying to innovate and push its boundaries further. Instead, throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Google began acquiring several companies, like AdSense, Youtube, and AOL, in addition to other companies related to search engines and data processing. These acquisitions help Google further their influence and impact of their brand.

Overall, Google is a huge brand and is a part of the daily lives of most people living in the developed world. Its influence will only continue to grow, making our lives easier just one Google search at a time.