I have one question, how did you found my blog? By blog listing, entrecard, seocial bookmarks, or Google search? I guess many of my blog reader came from Google search.
Google has changed our way to find our favorite web/blog, and also changed the way we use internet. But how a simple internet research project conducted by Larry Page and Sergey Brin grew as one of biggest company in the world, and changed our life?
On Sept 7 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while both of them were PhD students at Stanford Univ, founded Google Inc at their friend's garage. Google itself was a research project, based on their hypothesize that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page (later they call it as pagerank syste) . This geekie duo only had four computers, $100.000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun Microsystems), and idealism to start their business.
On Sept 7 2008, Google Inc already kicking the rooftop. They had listed on NASDAQ, employed 20.000 workers, had $ 150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing, technology. Their service is very ranged now, starting from email, online documents, advertising, free blog, to online map. They also tried to make fortune in mobile phone project by Google Android. The company now occupies a 1.5 million-square-foot headquarters called the "Googleplex" - as well as two dozen other U.S. offices and hubs in more than 30 other countries.
Despite of their success story, Google gained many controversy related to their business practices and services. They faced copyright and censorship issue, privacy issue, click fraud issue (on their adsense service). It may looks contrary to their slogan "Don't be evil" but they still gained positive credits for their contribution for internet technology development.
Happy anniversary Google!