Today is the 12th birthday of search engine giant Google, so you may have noticed their special doodle on the homepage. The company started back in 1998 and in those 12 years, has gone on to beat the competition out of the water. Google does not only creates Doodles for themselves; there has been a number of other designs over the years.
Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the idea of Google in 1996 while working on a research project. The two students worked on finding a better system to analyze the relationships between websites. The technology at the time — called Page Rank — determined a website’s relevance by its number of pages and the importance of pages that linked back to the original site.
The duo’s project was originally dubbed “BackRub”, because the search engine checked back links to determine site importance. The company name, later changed to Google, originated from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros.
Google has gone on to do much more than just being a search engine, they have tried some things and they have not worked out that well, but Android OS is a complete success. They have tried their hand at social media services, but most of what they do has not taken off.
On Google’s 12th birthday, let’s take a look back at Google’s major milestones over the years from PCWorld.
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