A brief history of the Google search engine.

Google is now the most dominant search tool on the web, setting the standards that others try to follow and better, as yet unsuccessfully. It was founded in 1998 - relatively late compared to many of the popular search engines - by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were graduate students from Stanford University.

Page and Brin had been working together on a search engine they called "BackRub" since early 1996, but with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a company in 1998 and went looking for investors to back them. Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998. The founders hired Craig Silverstein - who was later to become Director of Technology - as their first employee, and started the business in a friend's garage.

Google was still in an alpha stage, with an index of just 25 million pages, but it was handling 10,000 search queries every day. The search engine and the company grew quickly through word of mouth, initially with regular web users coming across the tool and finding the results to their liking.

Usage spread rapidly through press coverage, awards and recommendations, whilst Google's effectiveness and relevance, its speed and reliability, plus clean visual effects and 'quirky' nature all contributed to a rapid increase in the number of new advocates.

Google took a major step forward in 2000 when it replaced Inktomi as the provider of supplementary search results on Yahoo. Since then it has won further successes and now provides search data to Yahoo as its primary results, as well as to AOL, Netscape and Freeserve and BBCi in the UK. This gives Google exceptional coverage of web searches and it now has more than 50% share of the total search market, making it the clear market leader.

Google provides a range of search options, including an image search, directory information taken from the Open Directory, discussion groups (acquired from DejaNews), and a news search service launched in 2002.

Read more here:

• Google History
  
• Google Timeline
  
• Google Search Engine Prototype
  
• Google's Business Principles
  
• Google's Technology
  
• Help with Searching Google and Search Features
  
• Google in different Languages and Countries

How to get a high search engine ranking on Google...

Learn more about the other main search engines: AltaVista, FAST, HotBot, Inktomi, Lycos and Teoma.

To find out how your website can achieve a top ranking on Google and the other top search engines, contact the web search workshop for more information or request a FREE site assessment to see how well your website currently performs.

Return to Materials introduction
The top web search engines
The top web directories
How the top search tools work together
Options for paid search listings
UK search engines and directories
Partnerships between UK search engines and directories
European search engines and directories
The future of web search tools