It’s Google’s birthday! Today, the search engine is exactly 23 years old. The opportunity to look back on the creation of one of the most influential companies in the modern world, which soberly celebrates the event with a simple doodle.
In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet on Stanford campus, in California. The American state is not yet the El Dorado of innovative companies, but the transition is already underway. The two students scent the vein. At a time when the Internet is gaining a place in more and more homes, they have a genius idea. They launched Google in 1998. The rest, we know it.
The creators decide to use a name derived from the formula of the mathematician Edward Kasner, the “googol”, which designates a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Legend has it that Sean Anderson, another student who came up with the idea, would have tricked into registering the domain name, thus giving Google. Anyway, the same year, the young company is already attracting investors.
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Little Google has become big
She then moved into Susan Wojcicki’s garage, the future boss of YouTube. A few twists and turns later, Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Every day, its search engine processes billions of requests in 150 languages, hosted in 20 data centers across the planet. The site is without context one, if not the cornerstone of the 2021 web.
And that’s without counting the many other fields of activity in which the Mountain View firm is illustrated. While the latter is preparing to launch its sixth smartphone, its browser, the most used in the world, continues to be regularly updated. Operating system, GPS, artificial intelligence, the time when Google was only a search engine seems a long time ago.
There is of course a dark side to this success. The company is indeed bathing many cases of abuse of a dominant position, and several countries are starting to ask him to settle scores. Meanwhile, Google is soberly celebrating its birthday. For the occasion, the group contented itself with posting a traditional animated doodle on its search engine.