Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Google turns 9 today and what a nine years it's been. From a garage startup to an entity paralleled only by Star Trek's Borg in information and influence. Let's take a brief look at how the past 9 years have gone shall we?

• 1996: Larry and Sergey begin work on the BackRub search Engine, forerunner of Google.
• 1998: They raise $1m in investment and open Google’s first offices in Menlo Park, California. Google is named in PC magazine’s top 100 websites and Search Engines for 1998.
• 1999: Moves offices twice, first to Palo Alto, then to Googleplex, its current home in Mountain View, California. The beta label comes off in September.
• 2000: Announces partnership with Yahoo. Officially becomes the world’s largest search engine – it now has a billion-page index.
• 2001: Eric Schmidt joins Google. Google Images launched.
• 2002: Google News and Froogle launched.
• 2003: Google AdSense – a program that chooses advertising according to a web page’s content – is launched.
• 2004: Gmail is launched.
• 2005: Google Earth is launched.
• 2006: Google China, or Google.cn, is launched. Google purchases YouTube.com for $1.65 billion.
• 2007: Google open Gmail to everyone. Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Of course, this is only a brief summary of what they've done. Other than throwing the entire SEO community for a loop back in November of 2003 (ugh) you can view more of the timeline of this leviathan at the following sites:

• Google Corporate History - Google.com
• Google Acquisitions - Wikipedia.com

There are of course countless other sites where one can gain more information on Google if you're interested.

And so a big happy birthday goes out to Google. As much as many of us may complain about them from time-to-time, they are the reason I have a job, we have a company, and you have an interest in this blog post. :)

Labels: birthday, google