From Garage Business to Household Name in 5 Years

You probably use it every day, but did you know Google is now a word in the dictionary? How can a search engine be so popular that it influences how nearly all businesses market themselves on the Internet? Google's secret was the development of a unique algorithm to not just index the contents of a page, but to help ensure that you get the most relevant results for a particular search. From this starting point, Google has evolved to become a household name and sets the standard for all search engines.

Google was started by Larry Sage and Sergey Brin in 1996. Initially named "Back rub," their search engine started to gain popularity on the Stanford University campus. In 1998, the founder of Sun Microsystems gave the two a check for $100,000 after a quick demo. Sage and Brin leased office space in a friend's garage and started Google.com. 1999 brought dramatic change and growth to Google as the company moved twice and got bigger.

By 2000, 18 million user queries every day were being answered by Google. By 2002, Google had expanded to advertising, search appliances, Google News and Froogle. In 2004, Google had indexed 6 billion items (plus 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages). Google has continued to grow and expand its technology, now offering PDFs of public domain books for download, for example.

Google has made vast amounts of data accessible to the public, such as: years of historical film footage, U.S. Patents, Maps (Earth, Moon and Mars), pictures, video, music, and of course their staple: websites. Google ranks in the top 3 sites for internet traffic, so most internet marketers give serious thought to how Google will see their site.

Google is a big part of the Internet. The public uses it to search, and companies use Google to advertise, or to analyse the competition. Optimizing a site for Google to help your company show up higher in search results can have a big impact on your bottom line, and the effect can carry over to other search engines as well. This has become a fact of life in the web development industry and will continue to be so in the future.