Google’s 11th Birthday. Journey from a Dream to Cult of Internet

It’s Internet’s God’s Birthday today: Google’s 11th birthday on Sunday, September 27th, 2009: to celebrate, the company has changed its logo to a version that turns the letter “L” into the number 11.

What’s interesting about the logo change is that Google’s official birthday is somewhat disputed: some often declare the company was born on September 15th 1997, the day the Google.com domain was registered. Meanwhile, Google filed for incorporation in September 1998: the papers were filed on September 4th, but Google has been known to celebrate on both September 7th and September 27th.

The Journey began more than two decades ago in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin working on the Stanford Digital Library Project. The goal was to develop an integrated and universal digital library.

Larry Page focused on the problem of finding out solution to the problem, which would later become the base fot the internet.  He concluded that the no. of web pages linking to a given page, considering the number and nature of such back-links  could give out valuable information about that page.  Page’s first web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996. The first was on Page’s own Stanford home page. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the root of the internet search, PageRank algorithm.

Originally, the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. And first search was available on 27th September, hence the day marks the importance in the history.

There on, the growth had been exponential.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. But gogle still had no source of revenue. It needed to grow witht he eamn that needed additional servers.In

In 2000, Google finally found the source which became the sole source of revenue: Advertising. Even today, more than 85% of Google’s revenue comes from Adsense.

Google’s declared code of conduct is “Don’t be evil“. And since then we have seen Google grow like anything.

Though we have seen lots of questions over the Data privacy that google holds, still nothing concrete has hit google, till date.

Today, Google is the no.1 in search and leader in Email, Apps, Voice, IM and several other services. With the upcoming Google Wave, the era of Internet will change, again, thanks to google.