Various forms of communication date back as far as time. It is crazy to see how vastly communication has transformed from what it was to what it is. In my opinion, we can thank technology and the internet for that. More specifically, Google. Google is know to be the largest and most popular search engine in the world. So as many of you may be wondering, how did it all start?
The Google search engine was created in 1996 by two students from Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (Pictured below)
Initially, it started out with the name “BackRub”, named for the analysis of the web’s “back links”. However, Page and Brin were not satisfied with the name so they continued to brainstorm names relating to the indexing of an immense amount of data. After a long lived process of elimination, they stumbled upon two names that they felt held the most significance in relation to their new creation. “Googolplex” and “Googol” were the two name finalists, both words relating to specific large numbers. When they went to physically create the website and type the new name into the domain, the two names were unfortunately taken. They began to type in other names until they had a mistype and accidentally stumbled across the name Google. So why was Google even created to begin with? Page and Brin were fascinated with extracting meaning from the mass data accumulating on the internet. The key idea of Google was to leverage Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each websites “backing links”, the number of other pages linked to them. Most other search engines at the time simply returned a list of Websites ranked by how often a search phrase appeared on them. Brin and Page incorporated into the search function a number of links each website had. I.e., a website with thousands of links would logically be more valuable than just one with a few links, and the search engine thus would place the heavily linked site higher on a list of possibilities.
As for the development of Google, it is quite fascinating and shocking nonetheless with how quickly it skyrocketed. In 1998, Brin and Page started to receive outside financing. They ultimately raised around $1 million from investors, family, and friends and they set up a shop in Menlo Park, California under the name Google. In 1999, Google received a $25 million round of venture capital funding, it was processing 500,000 queries per day. Activity began to explode in the early 2000’s when Google became the client search engine for one of the Web’s most popular sites, ‘Yahoo!’. Then by 2004, when ‘Yahoo!’ dispensed with Google’s services, users were searching on Google over 200 million times a day. The growth only continued: by the end of 2011, Google was handling around three billion searches per day.
Overall, the impact Google had on society is absolutely incredible. It has thoroughly changed the way in which we communicate and gather information in the best way possible. While I could list countless ways in which this is, I will spare you all the time and only share a few that I deem the most important. Firstly, it allows us to obtain information instantaneously. So much so that it has completely transformed our way of thinking; society has become dependent on it to give us the information we need. It allows us to navigate and sort through all of the millions of websites and online information provided to us. Furthermore, we are able to communicate through our Google accounts via Gmail. Along with that, Google drive has made it possible to share documents, presentations, spread sheets, etc. with any other Google account to make work and communication that much easier. Google is the past, present, and future and it will only advance as time goes on.
Comments
Post a Comment