Yes, Google turns 25 today and those who read me regularly will surely have been surprised and/or have imagined the titanic effort I have had to make not to start this news saying “It seems like a lie” or “How time flies”, but one day you are a kid coming home from school thinking about snacks and, suddenly, you’re already measuring the passage of time for anything in decades. Just a little while ago, without going any further, I remembered that the first viral in Spain occurred 30 years ago.
For this birthday, Google’s, I was more prepared psychologically, I must say that, since Less than a week ago we remembered his two decades since his official arrival in Spaina movement that occurred when it had already begun to become evident that Google was not just an Internet search engine, but that it was pointing (although at that time it was not possible to imagine how much) much higher, and that the search engine would be just one of its, over time, countless successes.
We all know what Google is these days, but the time is nonetheless right (aren’t birthdays always right?) to navigate back and remember the origins of which today is, without a doubt, one of the largest and most influential technology companies. A technology that began as a project of two young people, then graduate students, and who intended to create a more efficient information search engine on the Internet, in order to manage vast volumes of information, which would improve the model of the search engines of that time, based in directories.
This ability to manage high volumes of information gave rise to the name, Google, which, as those two people, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have already said on occasion, It derives from the mathematical term googol, which refers to 10 raised to the power of 100.. This name replaced the one originally intended for the search engine, which was BackRub. Thus, on this day, September 27, but in 1998, Google began to provide service with a structure consisting of a closet with around 80 servers.
Without major marketing actions, mainly due to the dissemination that users gave it who tried it and were delighted with its operation, The search engine began to quickly climb positions among user preferenceswhich made it soon become the most used search engine, thus displacing services such as Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Altavista and many others that, until then, were the ones we usually used.
Many of us have asked ourselves, on more than one occasion, What would have happened if Yahoo! would have accepted Brin and Page’s offer to become, in 1998, with the search technology that they had designed, or the one that was also proposed in 2002, both rejected by the, at that time, Internet giant. Now, given their evolution, it seems clear that they would not have been able to reproduce the countless history of successes (which also has its shadows, of course) that have made Google the giant and the reference that it is today.
For the celebration, Google Spain has published 25 issues that define the company’s 25 years of history, a very interesting compilation that you can find here.
