More than just a search engine: From A for alphabet to Y for YouTube: This is how the internet giant Google | was born message

How two students created Google
Unique search concept
To this day, Google is considered one of the world’s most valuable companies

Google: The world’s most popular search engine on the Internet. According to Statista, the group holds 70.43 percent on desktops and laptops and 93.29 percent of the global market share on mobile devices and is therefore pretty much a household name. Since 2004, the terms googled and googled have even been listed as synonyms for Internet research in the Duden and are therefore an official part of the German language.

Search engines were already developed and implemented with the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1989, but ultimately Google was able to ascend the throne of search engines and never gave it up again.

The early years of Google

In 1996 the two computer science masters at Stanford University – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – together to program the Backrub program together. Backrub was the first attempt by the later search engine Google.

What was special about this first version was that it used a technology called PageRank, which determined the relevance of certain websites to a certain search term. This concept met with great enthusiasm right from the start, after which the two students were motivated to work on the further development of the software.

With that, Google was born.

Page and Brin mostly worked from their student rooms, borrowing from credit card companies and borrowing computers. This is how they worked until Google was a bit more mature and potential investors could be won over.

The concept worked when they came across Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. He was so enthusiastic about the concept of Google that he quickly wrote the students a check for 100,000 US dollars.

With this financial injection, the company Google Inc. was officially founded on September 4th, 1998. Shortly thereafter, the young company was able to collect a further $ 900,000 in investment money – one of the investors was none other than Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

That paved the way and Google opened its first office in Menlo Park, California. In September 2001 the search engine was already booking 10,000 search queries a day, officially ending the beta test phase.

The rapid ascent

In the same year, the two founders patented their PageRank technology and at the same time moved into a larger office building near Palo Alto.

In 2004, the company then went public with a starting price of $ 85, with the price rising to $ 100.34 within the first 24 hours. The IPO turned around 1,000 employees who owned shares into millionaires in one fell swoop. From a standstill, the group generated a market capitalization of $ 1.66 billion.

Rapid success in the years to come enabled the company to develop additional services such as Gmail (e-mail service), Google Voice (telecommunications service), and Google Docs (word processing program) and offer them for free on the Internet.

To this day, Google generates almost all profits from advertisements and is one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Over the years, the group developed more and more products, such as the Android operating system, Google Nexus (Android-based devices from Google) and the successor series Google Pixel. Google also bought the video platform YouTube in 2006. Today, a total of 24 companies belong to Google or Alphabet, so that the group now offers significantly more products than just the original search engine.

In 2015, Google was restructured, in the course of which today’s parent company Alphabet was launched, which simultaneously took over all subcontractors. This should give the individual departments more autonomy and freedom to develop. In addition, this project served to clearly delimit the company branches from one another. As a result, the core idea of ​​Google – the search engine – was encapsulated by subcontractors such as YouTube, Android, and HTC.

As a result, the group can now concentrate on specific products and innovations.

This also applies to the area of ​​cloud services, which in the digitalization is becoming more and more important. In 2019, the Google Cloud Platform generated sales of 8.92 billion US dollars, which corresponds to 5.5 percent of Google’s total sales, according to Statista.

But not only the cloud service has gained in relevance for the tech giant in recent years, the digital and personal assistant Google Assistant, which has been available since 2016, is now an important pillar of the group. The software is with Android, iOS as well as Google Home and works with both speech recognition and written text. On command, the Google Assistant delivers the latest news or reads the calendar and WhatsApp messages. But timers and alarm clocks can also be set via voice control. Last but not least, the Google Assistant can also play playlists and radio stations.

But when it comes to innovation, Google is now working on several fronts. The subcontractor Waymo has been working on technical solutions for autonomous vehicles since 2016, which should be controlled exclusively with artificial intelligence. As Forbes reports, according to Morgan Stanley, the Google subsidiary is already worth 175 billion US dollars, even though the autonomous vehicles are not yet commercially available.

While Sergey Brin initially served as Alphabet President, Larry Page held the role as CEO.

In December 2019, however, the two founders resigned from their respective positions. However, they continue to act as co-founders, employees, board members and majority shareholders.

Sundar Pichai currently represents the company as CEO of Alphabet.

Today Google or Alphabet is one of the most influential companies in the world. It is not just the enormous profits that make the group so powerful, but above all the information on private individuals and companies that Alphabet holds.

Henry Ely / Forex-news.com.net editors

Image sources: rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com, tanuha2001 / Shutterstock.com