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The world marks certain dates for historical reasons. Sept 4 is one of them.
Once upon a time, the search for direction to a place relied on hand-held maps or phone calls, & the quest for the meaning of a term took you to the research section in a real world library. Only a handful could boast of having email accounts with Yahoo, Rediff, Hotmail, et al. Then, on September 4, 1998, came Google.
Little did we know that this young Turk & its dedicated team running Google News, Gmail, Maps & Chrome, launched in the following decade, would change the way we would look at the world thereon. This September, Google turns 20.
Today, that search for information, be it for directions to a place or a kid’s project takes you directly to Google. So much so, that it even auto-finishes the sentences for you. Sometimes drawing an exasperated response, “Let me finish typing, Google!” from you.
From dorms to garage to Googleplex, here’s a look at the Internet giant’s journey. And we’ll understand if you stop reading at this point because the chances are, you’ve “Googled it”, already.
From Backrub To Google?
It all began in 1995 when Larry Page & Sergey Brin met at Stanford University, US only to later partner up to put together a search engine that we would know as Google. The idea was that the search should throw up links to individual pages on the World Wide Web (a Tim Berners-Lee invention), so as to establish the significance of each link.
This search engine was then named ‘Backrub’. However, it was renamed Google; a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This was symbolic of Larry & Sergey’s mission.
“To organize the world’s information & make it universally accessible & useful.”
Slowly becoming the cynosure of academics & investors combined, the company Google Inc. was officially born after Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry & Sergey a check for US $100,000 in August 1998. So the team made an upwardly move from dorms to a dedicated work garage to its current headquarters, The Googleplex, in California, USA.
Google Milestones
- The Burning Man festival theme has honor of being the first Google doodle in 1998. The stick figure in the logo was designed by Larry Page & Sergey Brin. It was to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed.
- Their initial server was made of Lego.
- 1st office was a garage owned by Susan Wojcicki (now CEO of YouTube) in California.
- “To google” was chosen as the “most useful word of 2002” by the American Dialect Society. It was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006 & to the XI edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July 2006.
- Orkut was a social networking website owned and operated by Google. Founded in 2004, it was named after its founder, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Designed as a place for users to meet & interact with old & new friends, it shut shop on September 30, 2014.
- YouTube was bought by Google in November 2006 for US $1.65 billion & is now one of Google’s subsidiaries.
- Yoshka, a Leonberger was the company’s 1st dog.
- Android Inc. was bought by Google in 2005. Android, mobile operating system, made its debut in 2007 & the 1st commercial Android device was launched in September 2008. The current 9.0 version “Pie” was released in August 2018. Designed primarily for smartphones & Tablets, Android has been developed by Google for televisions, cars, wrist watches & game consoles too.
Erm, Snooping Much?
- Recently, an investigation by news agency Associated Press (AP) revealed that many Google services on Android devices & iPhones stored your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that supposedly tells Google not to do so.
- In India, Google took responsibility of inadvertently coding an old UIDAI (unique identity number of Indian residents based on their biometric & demographic data) helpline number & 112 helpline number into the setup wizard of Android phones, after mass outrage when the number popped up in users contact lists. After issuing the apology in a statement, it said the numbers can be deleted manually & that it would fix it in the forthcoming editions of its setup wizard.
What Google has done & achieved in the last 2 decades is something that cannot be truly encapsulated within a single Web page. But Google lovers are already asking – what can we expect next?
What Next?
Now that Google’s turning 20, the word ‘Google’ today means more than Online search. So what will Google do next? What can we expect to see in the next decade? Like some of the US govt projects, those of Google, too, are under wraps. But one thing we are sure of – Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google’s already using AI to solve real world problems, & then some.
It’s used AI to develop a neural net that can detect signs of diabetic retinopathy using medical images of the eye. This year, the AI team showed how deep learning model could use those same images to predict a patient’s risk of a heart attack or stroke with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. The stated aim of Google – applying AI to products & to new domains, & developing tools to ensure that everyone can access AI.
All we can say is – ALL THE BEST, GOOGLE.
Image Credit: Google
