BackRub, you probably don’t know what it is exactly. And no, I’m not referring to the brief massage of a person’s back and shoulders “Because that would be written as “Back rub”. BackRub is actually the first name given to GOOGLE. And where did I learn that? From Google of course!
And to further explain how it evolved to “Google”, the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain name Google.com on September 15, 1997. It came from the name play “googol”, which is a term for a very large number, 1 following 100 zeros. The name reflects the company’s mission to organize and produce searches for all of the data on the Internet.
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The Road to Success
Google’s success just came from a simple insight by its founders. In the late 1990’s, they realized that the sprawling, chaotic mass of material that was cascading onto the World Wide Web could be tamed by ranking search results according to their popularity.
Pulling together $1 million from family, friends and other investors, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page launched their company on September 7, 1998. Since then, the company grew steadily to dominate online search worldwide, and with that, taking a substantial share of online advertising revenues.
We can’t buy and sell things directly neither we pay it direct money every time we use it, yet now, Google is ranked 2nd on the Forbes World’s Valuable Brands List. It now has a whopping brand value of $82.5 Billion as of May 2016.
Interesting Facts
Google is more than a search engine, here are some interesting facts that you might not know:
• Google beats Facebook: it’s the world’s most visited website. It also became the world’s largest search engine since June 2000.
• The company has acquired around 127 more companies in 12 years.
• On August 16, 2013, Google went down for 5 minutes and in that time, the global internet traffic dropped by 40%.
• Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stocks just 18 months after YouTube’s creation.
• It handles over 2 trillion searches per year. That’s about 270 searches per person on earth.
Affecting the Society
It’s been more than a decade since Google went public. Back in 2004, investors weren’t entirely sure what to make of Google, and skeptics arise. Looking today, we have seen how much the company has grown and how much it affected the society.
Aside from providing us information in just a click, and providing us apps that are now a part of our daily lives like Google Maps, Google Earth and Gmail, it also dominated our smartphones. Google’s smartphone operating system, the Android, could have earned the firm billions if they have not released the code for free. Not to mention that the word “Google” already became a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2000.
Google continues to make advanced technology projects that could impact the world for decades to come. From the driverless car, to the google Glass, to the Project Loon, their visions are endless. It will be no wonder if in the coming 10 or 20 years, Google will still be a big player.
One more thing, here is an interesting trivia. If you search “atari breakout” in the Google Images, you can play the game.
What are you waiting for? Just Google it.