Google turns 20 today!
To mark the anniversary, today’s Doodle looks back to explore the most popular searches all over the world throughout the last two decades.
Twenty years ago, two Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched a new search engine with a view of organizing the world’s information and making it accessible and useful to all.
That seemed like an incredibly ambitious mission at the time, even considering that in 1998 the web consisted of just 25 million pages (roughly the equivalent of books in a small library).
Twenty years on Google is still dedicated to building products for everyone. Today, Google offers search in 150 languages across 190 countries.
Turning back, flipping forward: how we’re marking 20(ish) years of Google this month → https://t.co/bxzOlsDTma pic.twitter.com/vooF1LCLVB
— Google (@Google) September 4, 2018
On its birthday, Google has introduced an insight into the next chapter of Search, which seeks to make information more accessible and useful to everyone. The future will see three fundamental changes:
First, the search will step from answers to journeys. The feature will allow users to resume tasks where they left off. Google is thus organizing search results so as to help determine what information to explore next.
“Rather than presenting information within a set of predetermined categories, we can intelligently show the subtopics that are most relevant to what you’re searching for and make it easy to explore information from the web, all with a single search,” Google's VP of Communications Products Nick Fox said in a blog post.
In another development, Google will be shifting from queries to providing a query-less way to get to the information by surfacing relevant information related to users’ interests, even when they don’t have a specific query in mind. It’s actually an update to the Google Feed, including a new name, a fresh look, and a brand-new set of features.
At last, the Search will shift from text to a more visual way of finding information. This will see the Google Images completely redesigned to help users find information more easily.
Starting this week, Google will also show more context around images, including captions that show the title of the webpage where each image is published. The search engine will also suggest related search terms at the top of the page for more guidance.
Google has changed a lot over the two decades of its existence. What’s unchanged is the name of the search engine and the primary colors in the logo.
Since it was established, the company has constantly refined its services and given birth to various products. At the same time over 20 years Google has largely turned all of us into lazy know-it-alls.
It offers services designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides), email (Gmail/Inbox), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant messaging and video chat (Google Allo, Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Google Earth, Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google Keep), photo organizing and editing (Google Photos) and others.
While people around the globe can hardly imagine their lives without Google, there are a few facts that could still be unknown.
The name Google originated from a misspelling of the word “googol,” which is the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred 0s.
Google’s simplistic homepage was the result of the founder’s lack of knowledge in HTML. The company has stayed with a simple design ever since.
Happy 20th anniversary!