A Brief History
On September 4, 1998, a pair of Stanford University students founded what has become the premier internet search engine, Google, although Google is also heavily involved in other areas, such as software, AI, electronics, advertising, and cloud computing.
Digging Deeper
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, a company the BBC has called the “most powerful company in the world,” in the aptly named Menlo Park, California, an allusion to the site of Thomas Edison’s invention laboratory. The 25 year old students, one from the USA and the other born in Moscow, Russia, were already college graduates and were working on advanced degrees when they came up with their Golden Goose of a company.
One of the most valuable companies in the world, Google has about 140,000 employees and is, along with Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, one of the “Big 5” American tech companies. So pervasive is Google for web surfing, the generic verb “to google” has come to mean conducting an internet search, much as any cotton swab is called a “Q-Tip” or a tissue is called a “Kleenex.”
Can you imagine life before Google?
Question for students (and subscribers): Do you usually use Google or a different search engine? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Girard, Bernard. The Google Way: How One Company is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It. No Starch Press, 2009.
Redding, Anna. Google It. Square Fish, 2021.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by The Pancake of Heaven! of Googleplex Headquarters, Mountain View, US, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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