The history of Google begins with data. Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally explored the concept of Google in an attempt to connect the data that existed on the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s. At the time, the World Wide Web, now commonly referred to as the internet, was really in its blooming stage and moments away from becoming the global wonder that it is today. Page and Brin both recognized this global possibility by viewing the World Wide Web as forum of individual webpages in need of organization. At the time, the few search engines that existed were very simple and organized search results in order of how each website’s respective content and copy explicitly matched the search input. In other words this was a very simple form of SEO. Google, which had not been named yet, sought to change that approach to searching the internet. Page and Brin wanted to explore the internet as an interconnected “web” of webpages where each link or multiple links that were listed on each page created and attached different values and respectability to the given webpage. It was this idea that formed the nucleus of Google.
This idea garnered much attention and brought Google’s originators into the eyes of outside investors. Under the now recognizable name of Google, the search engine company was born in a small garage in Menlo Park, California. Page and Brin worked quickly and were soon able to upgrade their garage location to a proper office in Palo Alto, California. However, the duo’s work is not to be overlooked. Starting as a small, unknown startup from the dorm rooms of Stanford University, Page and Brin took their idea of what internet searching should be and made it a reality. By 1999, Page and Brin were able to create an index of approximately 60 million webpages. Moreover, Google was quickly being recognized as better and more efficient than notable sites such as Yahoo.com and former powerhouse AOL.com. In short, it was becoming clear that Google stood a strong chance to reshape the way individuals and even entire companies approach the internet.

Google succeeded early on by taking a different perspective towards internet search. This ingenuity amassed a healthy and loyal group of users. Perhaps this is something that has been overlooked in Google development into a world or internet leader. At the time, customer loyalty was something that was traditionally reserved for brick and mortar establishments; it was that sort of tangible nature that consumers were used to and with which they were familiar. However, Google offered a service that was so simple and easy to use that internet users quickly recognized the utility the platform offered in daily life. Google, recognizing this shift in consumer behavior, quickly began monetizing this loyalty through keyword and search-based advertising. In the year 2000, Google began generating revenue based on keywords and click, a practice now commonly known as SEO.

Google’s ingenuity and the utility it provided to consumers helped the company transition from a garage startup in the “.com bubble” to a lasting presence on the internet. Google hit the mainstream in the early 2000s through affiliations with Yahoo.com, a corporate relationship which allowed hundreds of millions of internet users easy familiarity with the web service. This growth continued at a rapid pace, garnering Google billions and billions of internet searches per day as the .com bubble transitioned into the 2010s. Now, Google is associated with so much more than simple keyword search. Today, Google affords its users access to industry leading email and Google Maps. Google began as a pioneer in the relatively undeveloped world wide web and has now transitioned into an internet leader and staple of the way everyone lives and searches across the globe.