Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. In 1996, during their grad school years they began a project developing a search engine called BackRub. This Search engine was ran on Stanford’s computers for a year, until it was decided that it took up too much of the University’s bandwidth. Google came to be born in 1997 when the pair decided that BackRub needed a new name. They came up with the name Google, meaning a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. This name was given to the search engine to reflect their efforts to organize an infinite amount of information on the World Wide Web (Google, 2011) .
During the summer of 1999, the term “Googlers” referring to “people who use Google” was coined by Michael Moritz who was on the Google Board. In 2003, American Dialect Society made “google” the “most useful” word of the year for the previous year. Over the next several years, Google has made many strides to become the number one search engine site on the internet (Google, 2011) .
More recently, Google has been stepped over by Facebook to take the rank of #1 visited website. Because of this blow, Google has been searching for ways to become a part of the social network. On average, Americans spend 138 million hours a month searching topics through search engines, compared to 906 million hours on social networking sites (Google vs facebook in 2010-Blow by blow review, 2010) . They may have found an answer…online social gaming. By the year 2012, this market is expected to climb to $2 billion (Parks Associates, 2007) .
So, what is the future of Google? They are pretty hush hush about it. This is what they have to say (Google, 2011) , “We don’t talk much about what lies ahead, because we believe one of our chief competitive advantages is surprise”. According to Google Labs, some new Google features include App Inventor for Android, Google Transliteration, Image Swirl, Google Reader Play, and Public Data Explorer (Google, 2011) . It seems that the every trial and tribulation that Google faces, they find ways to overcome them. As long as they are giving the consumer what they want, the company will continue to prosper.
References
Google. (2011, April). Google history - company. Retrieved June 3, 2011, from Google.com: http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/history.html
Google vs facebook in 2010-Blow by blow review. (2010, December 16). Retrieved June 3, 2011, from Reve News: http://www.revenews.com/ctmoore/google-vs-facebook-in-2010-a-blow-by-blow-review/
Parks Associates. (2007, June 29). Game ad spend to exceed $2 billion in 2010. Retrieved June 3, 2011, from Marketing Charts: http://www.marketingcharts.com/topics/entertainment/game-ad-spend-to-exceed-2-billion-in-2012-832/
Great Post! My two favorite sites that I use everyday, Google & Facebook. ;)
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