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09.27.07
Celebrating 9 Years Of Google Technology
 By Philipp Lenssen
Google.stanford.edu in late 1997. Sergey Brin in 1999 says, "A perfect search engine will process and understand all the information in the world ... That is where Google is headed."
Google.com, a PageRank 10 homepage, turns 9 years old today, according to the special logo put up for the occasion (though many different days can be defined as Google's birthday, and you may even consider Google to be as old as 12 years, depending where you put the "start" flag). To wrap up the history: Google started as a search engine, and it's still a search engine today. Of course, it's also trying to be much more today, in particular, an office suite processing information. But I'm sure we'll see some more birthday logos before that turns to the kind of mainstream in which today's market leaders are positioned. And we might see even more birthday logos pass by until Google truly understands information, but according to one of its co-founders, that's where it's headed.
In-between being a search engine and staying one, this is what also happened during the last 9 years, in semi-particular order:
• The Google homepage goes out of Beta
• A Google Friends newsletter is started to address "Googlers," originally the term for Google users
• Google teams up with RealNames to bring now-forgotten Internet Keyword support to their search engine
• Google bought a huge Newsgroup archive from Deja News and turned it into Google Groups. The first mention of Madonna on the internet is now owned by Google Inc.
• Google created a technology playground called Google Labs, where they release tools such as Google Sets
• Yahoo switches to Google results, but later changes their mind and develops their own search engine back-end to compete with Google and Microsoft in the club of the three only high-scale search engines worldwide
• Eric Emerson Schmidt, then 46, replaces Larry Page, then 28 years old, as boss of Google
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.
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