Backrub to Google: 20 years of world’s most popular search engine

The revolutionary search engine Google is 20-years-old now. It started as a research project back in 1997 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, when they were Ph.D. scholars in Stanford University.

Initially, the search engine was named ‘Backrub’ and subsequently changed to Google. Their first domain was registered on 15 September 1997.

Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and from there on it went on to become the most commonly used search engine in the world.

As of today, the company has over 60,000 employees in 50 different countries, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globe, from YouTube and Android to Smartbox and, of course, Google Search. 

Google’s chain of products and services which have been of great use to students, and professionals include Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, Gmail, Google Calendar, cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant messaging and video chat (Google Allo/Duo), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and turn-by-turn navigation (Google Maps/Waze), notetaking (Google Keep), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos).

The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system based on the Chrome browser. 

In 2015, Google formed a company, Alphabet Inc. with the purpose of serving as a holding company and conglomerate to own the subsidiaries that were previously owned by Google, including a new “slimmed down” version of Google itself. On 10 August 2015, Sundar Pichai was named the new CEO of Google.