Google News, Inside.

According to Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. Larry was a 24-year-old University of Michigan alumnus on a weekend visit; Sergey, 23, was among a group of students assigned to show him around. They argued about every topic they discussed. Their strong opinions and divergent viewpoints would eventually find common ground in a unique approach to solving one of computing’s biggest challenges: retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data.

By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website. Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™ bricks, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department’s loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network.

This little excerpt, taken from Google’s corporate history page, is a little confusing. But looking at Google’s homepage today, we can clearly see what is going on.

Google’s actual birthday is September 27th, 1996. Nine years ago, the prosperous company which we call Google, was born.

Google has taken many different turns and has grown to be worth, oh gosh, well, last quarter they reported USD$3.84 billion in revenue. Expecting for that number to only increase, we could comfortably say that they are worth well over USD$16 billion. They are probably prospected to be worth more, but that’s what I’m envisioning right now.

Google has already proven themselves worthy as being the Search leader, but they have yet to prove themselves as the future of Office. Google has a ton of products being ready to be released soon, it’s just the matter of time.

I’m excited to see where Google takes the world next.

This phrase comes to mind when I think of Google: “when companies compete, the consumer wins.” And that is so true.