Blog Post #6: Technology

 History of Google

In 1995, Sergey Brin who was a Ph.D. student at Stanford at the time, gave Larry Page, a prospective student at the time, a tour of the school. At first, they did not get along at all, and butt heads on most subject matters and it wasn't until a year later when they first struck up a partnership. When they first developed the idea to launch a search engine, their original name for it was "backrub" until they launched in 1998 and changed the name to Google Beta. Google Beta was a very small version of the Google we know now and did not have any applications associated with it at the time. As we know now, Google has many different applications and even their own browser now since launching 20 years ago.

After the original launch in 1998, they removed "beta" from the title in 1999 and became known as what we know today, Google. After they changed the name, Page and Brin made the move to Silicon Valley to move operations out there with their single employee at the time. Moving into the 2000s, Google was picking up and expanding like wildfire. In 2000 they had added new languages to google so it was no longer just accessible for people who spoke English. 

However, it wasn't until 2004 that google really picked up when they started adding applications to the Google database, which started with Gmail. In the next four years, google continued to expand and add more apps and in 2008 they launched Google Chrome. Things continued to change over the next few years as they got a new CEO in 2014, Sundar Pinchai and they released the first Google smartphone in 2016. 

In the past 22 years, Google has truly started from the bottom and blossomed into something that has become so prominent in our daily lives. That's not to say it is all positives because it is still the internet which means there are a lot of fake news sites, as well as a lack of privacy but for the most part Google has made finding information so much easier and accessible to everyone. 

Sources: https://www.mirrorreview.com/history-of-google-from-1996-to-2019/ 

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17823490/google-20th-birthday-anniversary-history-milestones