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Google Turns 10
Ian Lamont writes "It was on September 7, 1998 that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc., aiming to provide a better search engine. You can see what it looked like here. Google had a relatively good search engine technology that succeeded in burying many late 1990s competitors, and it eventually developed a successful advertising model and pledged to operate on a 'don't be evil' philosophy. The company now has nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value, and has been acquiring or developing a host of groundbreaking technologies. When did you start using its search engine? Is the world a better place because of Google?"
For those curious, like I was, here are the original Google server pictures missing from the Wayback Machine's archive.
you had me at #!
Google AND the Big Lebowski make the scene in that fateful year. Coincidence? Hmm.....
I don't know about Google, but the world is definitely a better place because of the Dude.
Careful What You Wish For....
Of all the search engines, Google was the best name to use as a verb.
"All this time I thought 'Googling yourself' was the other thing."
-- Marge Simpson
I don't know, well before 2002. I'm sure they know the exact date!
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
In late 1999 I heard buzz from my fellow geeks that Google provided amazing results, so I tried it out. Within a couple days, I completely abandoned Alta Vista for Google, and even scaled back bothering with Yahoo because the results were just crazy accurate. I found myself boosting it to friends both of the geek persuasion and not, and everyone liked it. IMO, it was truly a case of a superior product trouncing the competition, the entire point of capitalism. They built a better mouse trap (pun not entirely intended).
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
how bad search really was before Google. For that matter it's easy to forget that it used to take work to find information at all. Our culture has just barely begun to come to terms with how revolutionary this change really is.
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There was no one search engine that I used until somebody at work told me about Google (early 2001). Lycos, Dogpile, AltaVista, Yahoo, etc and so on all come to mind. There was no "loyalty" until Google. Google set the standard. Let's hope it doesn't grow too big for it's breeches.
Google started off running on Stanford equipment, and was spun off, as happens frequently at Stanford. Sun and Cisco also started with Stanford people and equipment.
Stanford has become a real estate company and a venture capital firm that runs a university on the side for the tax break. It's working out very well; they now have $21.6 billion in investment assets, including a big chunk of Google. This started around 1991, when the financial management operation was spun off as a separate company. The financial operation invests in venture pools, which in turn fund venture capitalists, which fund startup companies, some of which become big. They can draw on expertise from the academic side to help evaluate investments. It's working quite well; annualized returns for the past decade were 15.1%. Tax free!
Same here.
One day, when Yahoo was still king, I was having bad luck finding results. I had tried all the search engines I knew about.. Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc.
Finally I asked Jeeves for the "best web search" and he recommended Google. Well done, Jeeves!
The problem with Google is that their "don't be evil" claim is hard to take seriously any more. Ads at the right of search results weren't too bad, but then it went downhill. They created the "content-related ad" industry, which resulted in a vast number of "made for AdWords" junk sites and blogs, the "domaining" industry, and a vast amount of crap. Even real advertisers don't like it; the smarter ones opt out of the Google Content Network and stick with the search result ads.
From there it went downhill. Google doesn't do much to qualify their advertisers, and as we point out occasionally, about 35% of them are "bottom feeders", where you can't even identify the real business behind the ad.
Then there's Google Checkout. They accept very marginal businesses. They ought to be doing the kind of validation a bank does of its clients, but clearly, they don't.
Google's real problem is that they went public at the top of their game. Google was #1 in search when they went public, so they couldn't grow in their main business area. They had to expand to justify their high P/E ratio, and none of their expansion areas (YouTube, GMail, etc.) made money. So they had to figure out how to get more revenue per search result. At that point they started to turn to the dark side.