The all-seeing eye that is Google plays a vital role in everyone’s daily lives. When we’re not ‘Googling it’ – a phrase that’s a popular part of vocabulary in today’s society – we’re shopping with Google Pay, heating our home with Google Nest, and asking for a weather report from our Google Home.
After launching back in 1998, Google remains the most used web-based search engine in an industry where so many others have failed. In this blog post, we take a closer look at where it all began and how Google search is still a force to the reckoned with even to this day.
The company that started in a garage has no doubt come a long way! Google was founded in 1998 after being developed since 1995 by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The pair, who were well known for disagreeing about everything, worked together to create a search engine that was unfortunately named ‘Backrub’. Thankfully, they chose to rename Backrub shortly after. With this, Google was born with an aim “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, and it’s a mission that Google is still fulfilling to this day.
During these early years, Google caught the attention of many academics and tech specialists, and was subsequently offered investment. This investment was used to fund their work as well as finance a move from their dorm rooms to their first office, a garage owner by Susan Wojcicki who’s now the CEO of YouTube.
Over the years, Google has faced competition from a number of other tech companies, all of which have tried and failed to achieve comparable market dominance.
Its biggest competitors of past and present include Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, wireless communications giant Verizon, Ask (previously known as Ask Jeeves – yes, they’re still going!), Chinese search engine Baidu, Chinese ecommerce platform Alibaba, Apple, and Amazon.
Google’s speed, choice, relevance, branding, impressive market share, extensive platforms and tools, and support options means it’s pretty much unrivalled in the world of search. Its simplicity and accuracy is also revered across all browser age groups.
Despite some stiff competition, Google has remained at the forefront of search, and found success in various other industries too, and long may their reign continue!