National Google.com Day is on September 15. What better day to learn about the parent company that started it all than by celebrating with us here at National Today? Google is a big part of our lives. Google started solely as a search engine but now is a multinational technology company that offers many other services. The word ‘Google’ has become a verb. It’s pretty crazy to see how this search engine grew and is now embedded in our lives.
HISTORY OF NATIONAL GOOGLE.COM DAY The history of Google began in January 1996. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University, started a research project to build a better search engine. They developed an algorithm called PageRank, which analyzed relationships between websites; it determined their relevance based on the number of links to other sites. When the search engine was first developed, one of its earlier names was “BackRub.” This name was changed to Google, a misspelling of the word ‘Googol,’ which stands for the number one with 100 zeros after it. This was chosen because Google provides a lot of information and demonstrates that information on the internet is endless. On September 15, 1997, Page and Brin registered the domain “google.com.” In 1998, after raising money from investors, Page and Brin formally incorporated their business in a room attached to a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. By December 1999, Google was in beta mode, with about 10,000 search queries per day being answered. In 2003, Google moved its headquarters to what is now known as Googleplex. Originally, this was a 40-acre campus in Mountain View, California. Over time, they purchased several buildings on the site and gave them informal names. The campus had an open concept without cubicles, and balls were used as chairs. Merriam-Webster added the word ‘Google’ to its Collegiate Dictionary in 2006, defining it as: “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.” The company started as a search engine but now provides many other services. In 2015, the company restructured and became Alphabet Inc., and Google became its largest subsidiary.
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