How long has Google been around and what came before?
Most of humanity knows what “Googling” means and does it every day. But how long has Google actually existed? Which search engines did you use to search in the past and what became of them? We can answer these questions for you.
Did you know that Google itself takes action when newspapers or dictionaries use the term “Googling”? The search engine and the company behind it are so much a part of our everyday lives that it is feared that trademark protection will be jeopardized if “Googling” becomes a general term. However, this was not always the case and that is why we are addressing the question of how long Google has existed and how people searched before that.
Google has been around since 1997
The Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started operating a search engine back in 1996, which was then called “BackRub” wore. On September 15, 1997, the project was named Google and began to seriously compete with the search engine giants of the time.
Incidentally, the search engine owes its unusual name to a play on words. It was intended to express the enormous amount of information Google can provide and that is why the word “googol” was used. It was invented in 1938 and is considered the designation for the largest number with a name. This means a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Even in the German system you need 2 words for this number: “ten sexdecillion“.
Initially, Brin and Page peddled their concept and looked for investors. German entrepreneur Andreas von Becholtsheim wrote them the first check for $100,000. Incidentally, he did so under the name “Google Inc.”, because he assumed that the two would operate under this name. So the inventors first had to set up a company by that name in order to even get the money. In any case, his commitment paid off, because when Google went public in 2005, its shares were worth around $500 million.
The big difference between the market leaders of the time, such as Yahoo and AltaVista, lay in the patented PageRank method. This calculated how popular a page is on the Internet, which can make it rank high in search results or get lost in the crowd.
Despite the success and increasing number of users, Google did not make a profit in the first few years. That only changed with the introduction of Google AdWords. It was now possible to place context-relevant advertising for one’s own site on countless websites. Even if numerous other Google projects followed, this business model is still the company’s money engine.
However, Google also includes such popular products as Gmail, the Android smartphone operating system, Google Maps, Google News and numerous other offers. However, Google is not always successful. The various messenger systems from Google have all been flops so far, and the social network Google Plus is also not getting off the ground.
In our video: Google can even find your doubles!
How did people search before Google?
Google has existed in its basic form since 1997, but of course there were websites before that and they wanted to be found. The question “How long has Google existed?” has been answered, but how long have search engines existed?
Some names appear that are still known today, but no longer play a significant role in the search engine business.
Here is a list of the former stars before Google existed:
| search engine | story |
| Lycos | Lycos was a really successful search engine in its day. In 1999, lycos.com was the most visited website in the world. Founded in 1994, the decline as a search engine began at the turn of the millennium. |
| Yahoo | Yahoo was founded in January 1994, but had a different concept than today’s search engines. It was more of an editorial web directory and not a collection of data by automated bots. This concept didn’t work out and Yahoo lost more and more importance. |
| AltaVista | Founded in 1995, bought by Yahoo in 2003 and shut down in 2013, AltaVista was popular for a while. With AltaVista you could search for files. In addition to websites, images, videos and audio files were also found. |
| Fireball | The Fireball search engine was a German project, but it never really caught on with internet geeks. Developed at the TU Berlin in 1996, it was later promoted by the Gruner + Jahr publishing group. After all, in 1999 Lycos took an interest in it and bought it up. After some back and forth, Fireball continues to exist, but actually displays the results from Yahoo Germany. |
If you still hear anything about these Google predecessors today, then at most through scandals. For example, Yahoo had around 500 million account details stolen.
But even today, Google is constantly facing new competition. However, this usually focuses on niches or special areas. On the other hand, some countries want their own search engines for a variety of reasons. Such as the Russian search engine Yandex or the Chinese counterpart Baidu. Software giant Microsoft has been trying to get people interested in Bing for years. However, with little success. Even if Spiderman searches the film on Bing, those familiar with the scene still make fun of the fact that the film would probably end there. It also doesn’t help that Bing was built into the structure of Windows 10. Binging just isn’t cool. The maps are buggy and the background images are annoying.
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