Can you imagine a world without search engines? Before the invention of Archie, a simple yet effective web-based search engine, by Alan Emtage in 1990, finding anything online was less than pleasant. This was a turning point for internet users as it was closely followed by the launch of many other bigger and better search engines, including Excite, Yahoo, Infoseek, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and of course the now ever-popular Google. Although search engines populate highly personalized, contextual search results in a fraction of a second, there is more than what meets the eye. This, more so in the case of Google, the world leader in online search, with its mammoth 88.47% market share, not to mention its numerous other products and services. If you have forever wondered about the history of Google, including how it took over the world of internet search, this post is for you. We take you through a timeline of Google’s most landmark moments, right from its humble beginnings to its ambitious plans for the future.

The Beginning of a New Era in Internet Search 

A search engine, simply put, is a software program that helps you find appropriate content online (video, textual, images, etc.). It sorts/indexes the sites of the world wide web according to various parameters like search keyword density in your site content, backlinks, etc. When you query in a keyword or phrase, it goes through its database of crawled sites and populates the addresses of those it finds most relevant. The order in which such sites are ranked is based on an internal search algorithm that decides how useful they are to you, with the top most search results on the first SERP (search engine results page) being the most relevant. The SERP may also carry paid ads as per the PPC model (pay-per-click) at the top of the afore-mentioned organic search results. 

The history of Google is incomplete without mentioning its rather simple beginnings. Two Stanford University PhD students, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, met in 1995 and began working on a dissertation project that detailed the mathematical properties of the internet. In other words, the dynamic duo was interested in proving that the higher the number of quality backlinks pointing to a site, the more relevant it is to a specific search topic/keyword. This was in contrast to previous search engines that prioritized content keyword density above all else.

Nicknaming their fledgling project ‘BackRub’, Page and Brin tested their web crawler in March 1996, starting out by crawling Page’s Stanford web page. All the data collected was then analyzed and sorted by their brilliant ranking algorithm called PageRank, which ranked websites based on the number of times they were linked to by other high-authority or popular sites. 

Motivated by the positive reviews BackRub got, Page and Brin launched the very first version of Google in August 1996 while working from their dorm rooms, using borrowed personal computers and buying terabytes of memory space with their own credit cards. The name ‘Google’ was a derivative of the word â"