Sep 28 2009
Happy Birthday Google: Eleven years of the Internet search engine
Internet giants Google are this week celebrating their eleventh birthday, and to mark the occasion have changed their logo from the standard ‘Google’ to ‘Goog11e’ - pronounced Goog-eleven-ull.
Google, set up in 1998 as a directory of cricketing terms, was originally one of a number of domains bought up in September of that year by founders Geoff Boycott and Ian Botham; others included sillymidoff.com, shortthirdman.info, plumlegbefore.co.uk and slowleftchinamen.org.
As time passed, it became apparent that the majority of these domain names were woefully unmemorable for a non-cricket watching audience, so the shorter and catchier Google.com became the most widely used. Google have since sold all of their other domain names to assorted village cricket teams dotted around the UK and Australia.
The very first Google search engine was hosted by the University of Stanford, and boasted an index of over twenty five million pages of spam, vanity, trolling, really bad collaborative art projects and general nonsense. Today, this number has grown to ten kazillion MySpace, Facebook and Twitter spam pages, making Google the most used search engine in Kerguelen and parts of Outer Mongolia.
By the start of their second year, Google had introduced a web directory service and their brand new Adwords service. this was literally groundbreaking in that the servers had now grown to such a size that they had started to crack the tiles of Stanford Uni’s gym, which the founders had been renting from a local basketball club.
By their third year of operations in 2001, Google were already competing with search giants Yahoo!, Wahey! and Aha?, accounting for upwards 32% of total Internet usage and 80% of queries for ‘dancing hampsters’ by the year’s end.
2006 saw the project reach total world domination, as mathematicians officially changed the spelling of the word ‘googol’ to ‘Google’ in their honour. Additionally, a study carried out in August found that more children of primary school age had heard of Google than Ronan Keating, Charles Babbage or even cabbage, which I suppose isn’t really saying much, but is pretty impressive for a website of the dialup era nonetheless.
Today, the search engine continues to provide an invaluable service to cheating students and stupid people — known as GIYFites — worldwide. Who knows, perhaps in another eleven years the site will be indexing a megatrillion pages as we ride around on our hoverbikes taking our all-in-one meal pills.
