The 25th Anniversary of Google: A Ride of Progress, Controversy, and Challenges

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Guess what? Today marks the 25th birthday of Google!

Google, a titan of the past twenty years, has yet to reach its peak impact on our lives.

Google is like the powerhouse of the Web. It links us up, gives us info, and shakes how we live.

How Google came to be

Google’s story begins in the late 1990s, when two Stanford University Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, embarked on a project that would redefine the tech landscape. Their vision was to create a revolutionary search engine that ranked results based on popularity, an idea that evolved into the PageRank algorithm. This algorithm and a clean, ad-free interface set Google apart from its competitors.

Initially named “BackRub,” the project eventually adopted:

The name “Google,” is a play on the mathematical term “googol,” representing 10 to the power of 100.

The duo launched Google in September 1998, initially handling about 10,000 daily queries. Today, Google processes over 1 billion searches daily in 150 languages and across 190 countries.

Contributions to Humanity