The Evolution of Google: 22 Years and Counting

Introduction:

You probably heard one of your professors saying, “Just Google the information
after all everything is in the web.” But before we came to this, let us first know the
humble beginnings of the famous search tool, Google.

As we mark our 22 years, it has grown from simply a better way to explore the
internet to a search engine so woven into daily life its name has become a verb.

Google’s beginnings: BackRub

In 1996 our founders, Larry and Sergey began working on BackRub, a search
engine which utilized backlinks for search. It ranked pages using citation notation,
meaning any mention of a website on another site would count it as a vote toward the
mentioned site. A website’s “authority” or reliability came from how many people linked
to that site, and how trustworthy the linking sites were

BackRub Search: university

Search

university

BackRub Query Results

BackRub's Highest Ranked Sites

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

http:/www.uinc.edu/

694.687 8460 backlinks 12k - 10/25/96 - 11/1/96

Stanford University Homepage

 http://www.stanford.edu/

609.303 8857 backlinks 4k - none - 11/1/96

Stanford University: Portfolio Collection

http://www.stanford.edu/home/administration/portfolio.html.

167.919 34 backlinks

Google Officially Launches

We finally launches at the month of September 1998! This year saw the indexing
of more than 60 million webpages by our company although our name still carried the
tag ‘beta’ to indicate that we were still in test status.

Google Significant Growth

 A year after our launch (1999), we let go of the ‘beta’ tag from its title and
marched into an even more significant phase of growth. Armed with a simple but
powerful mission statement, ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful’, we were all set to change the way the world made use of the
internet!

Google Toolbar

We launch our search toolbar for browsers in the year 2000. The toolbar
highlights search terms within webpage copy, and allowed users to search within
websites that didn’t have their own site search.

Google Personalized Search

 Our Personalized search was launched in 2005. All searches on our Search
engine are associated with a browser cookie record. When a user performs a search,
the search results are not only based on the relevance of each web page to the search
term, but also on which websites the user (or someone else using the same browser)
visited through previous search results.

Google Universal Search

We also created “Universal Search.” A system that will blend listings from its
news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from
crawling web pages.

Google Suggest
 In 2008, we introduce “suggest” which displays suggested search terms as the
user is typing their query.

Google: Real Time Search

Last 2009 we also launch Real Time Search to bring latest or “real-time” content
from Twitter feeds, in Google News, some newly indexed content and a number of other
content sources. Over time, social media would become a more significant part of real-
time search, as the debate over the significance of social in search continued.

Google Instant
 In 2010, with the goal to provide users with the information they need as quickly
as possible we released Google Instant. As the users type their searches on desktop
devices they will see search suggestions and then be able to clock those suggestions to
see the results.

Expanded Site Links

On August 16, 2011, we introduced expanded site links to provide yet more
information beneath each sitelink displayed. There were initially up to 12 links displayed
for authoritative sites, but shortly after launch, this was limited to six.

Google: Expansion of Knowledge Graph

 “Knowledge Graph” was also introduced last July of 2013 to automatically and
instantaneously display information for certain searches within the SERP. The idea was
to provide users with the information more directly.

Google: Pigeon Update

In a bid to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that
are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals, we launched Pigeon
Update last 2014. This new algorithm improves our distance and location ranking
parameters.

Google: Mobilegeddon
 In 2015, we unleashed Mobilegeddon to force websites to add mobile-friendly
websites. The change acknowledges the rapid rise in mobile search use. It intended to
help users with finding quality results that are optimized for their devices. It’s also
expected to improve the ranking ability of Android (so far) apps

Google: Fred

Our “Fred” Update targets content sites engaging in aggressive monetization at

the expense of users at the year 2017. This update penalizes sites with low-quality
backlinks as well as those who value money over user experience.

Chrome Security Warning

 And last 2018 we released a much-awaited Chrome update; it warned around 2
billion users of the browser about a security flaw. The security warning is issued around
security vulnerability in our Chrome to help prevent other people from using or abusing
your account and keep your browser secure.

Ending Statement:

Since the beginning we focused on providing the best user experience possible.
We takes great care to ensure that our products and services will ultimately serve you to
their make life easier and saved valuable time. We will surely keep in mind that great
just isn't good enough especially when it comes to all of our users.