For Peter's Sake: This Day in History

Ten years ago today, two Stanford University students registered a domain name on the Internet. The students: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The name: Google.com.

Just under a year later, on September 7 of 1998, Page and Brin officially incorporated their small company that they ran out of a garage in Northern California. At the time, the Google search engine looked like this: (click image for full-screen view)

The rest, as they say, is history. The Google search engine quickly became popular because it organized search results efficiently. Even today, Google search engine users are loyal to the service, more so than any other search engine. The key to the Google search engine is a complex, ever-evolving series of algorithms that use a host of data to rank search results. The first search engines just counted how many times the search term appeared in each page, but this was easily manipulated. Google solved that problem by taking into account linking pages, metatags, and other data. In doing so, they made most of the data on the Internet more usable, fueling the enormous growth in the tech industry.

In 2000 Page and Brin started making money from their search engine. They used unobtrusive text-based ads that didn't get in the way of search results. This proved popular for both advertisers (who want a lot of viewers) and search users (who don't want distractions). Google expanded exponentially between 2000 and 2004, hiring on some of the brightest minds in the business and expanding its search services to images, news, and consumer products. Even when the Dot Com Bubble collapsed in 2001 the company continued to grow. By 2004 the company had become extremely profitable, and Google announced it would become a public corporation. The initial public offering raised over $1.67 billion (with a B!), making many of its employees millionaires and defying all expectations of Wall Street.

Today, Google is referred to by some as the "heart of the Internet." Its indexing and searching service drives thousands of online websites and businesses. Its ambitious projects include a revolutionary e-mail service, software and hosting for photos, an online office suite, a personalized home page, a wiki service, a desktop manager, 3-D rendering software, maps and satellite images, video, an RSS feed reader, a social network, and an online catalog of all printed books. Other rumored or planned products include a Google Phone, print and radio advertising, city-wide wireless Internet, and a Google-branded Linux operating system. But the core of Google is its search engine, which generates the vast majority of the companies revenue. In fact, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are estimated as the 13th and 14th richest people in the U.S., respectively. At current trading prices, the company is worth in excess of $150 billion! And it all started 10 years ago today.