The information revolution took off in the 1990s and one of the successful outcomes of it was the founding of Google, on September 4, 1998. Now available in 149 languages, Google has continued to be the #1 search engine in the world for 20 years.
No one and not even the co-founders, back in 1998, the two Stanford University Ph.D. students in Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have thought about the kind of success that Google has enjoyed to date.
It all started when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborated on a research project in January 1996. They presented a whitepaper, titled “The Anatomy of a Search Engine” which was a prototype of a large-scale online search engine that they had envisioned. In this whitepaper, the duo meticulously explained the PageRank search model, a link analysis algorithm to rank websites on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
The Late Rajeev Motwani, who was a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University was a mentor to the Google co-founders. At Stanford, he founded the Mining Data at Stanford (MIDAS) project, which went into studying new and innovative data management concepts.
A graduate of the prestigious IIT-Kanpur, Rajeev co-authored the initial paper on the PageRank algorithm at Stanford and his immense contribution as a mentor to both the founders of Google is well-documented.
This would not have been the case had Google gone ahead and retained its earlier name which was “BackRub”. The name BackRub came about as the main function of the website during its founding years was to check backlinks to determine the importance of a website.
The name Google has an interesting story behind it. The co-founders thought of naming the search engine as “Googol” initially which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. When they went on to book the domain name they ended up misspelling Googol as Google but liked the name and went ahead and booked the domain name Google.com on September 15, 1997.
Simplicity is what best defines Google. Starting from a clutter-free homepage design to the ease of the search procedure, Google is the Goliath amongst all the online search engines that exist out there.