Google’s dorm to riches story is captured in an interesting infographic and may take you down the memory lane as well.
Click to start the infographic.
This nostalgia-fueled infographic by Online PHD tells the story of Google which began in the year 1995 with Larry Page ad Sergey Brin meeting at Stanford University. In the year 1996, Page began his PhD in computer science and also worked with Brin to start BackRub. The start up was a web crawler that ranked pages based on which sites linked back to them, forming the basis of Google PageRanking. BackRub became unmanageable on Stanford servers and had to be commercialized and renamed Google, a misspelling of ‘googol’. After receiving $100,000 from Sun Microsystems, Google Inc., was established.
The first big investment came from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, to the tune of $25 million thanks to which the newly successful company could afford a second office in Mountain view, in the year 1999. By 2000, Google’s future as the World’s #1 search engine was sealed and in the same year, the company also won its first two Webby Awards. 2001 saw Sergey and Larry hire Google’s first CEO, Eric Schmidt, and the infographic goes on to narrate how in 2002 the history-making AdWords was launched. After AdWords was launched, Google continued to gain a foothold in online revenue generation and currently the company is the leading source of revenue generation online.
After going public in 2004, Google acquired Android in 2005 which would become the #1 mobile operating system in the world. 2008 saw the birth of Google Chrome, which eventually brought down both Firefox and Internet Explorer. The company did face a few setbacks like Google Wave and Buzz but has managed to be the most important Internet company in the world. Though Facebook pushed Google of the #1 visited site in the U.S. in 2010, Google still has the authority and credibility to call itself the most important Internet company.
The infographic however does not mention Google+, which has landed Google in controversy lately, thanks to their promotion of social search, which gives indexing importance to Google+ pages than pages from other social networking sites. It would be interesting to observe how this infographic would look at the end of this 2012, by when I am sure Google would have also made considerable forays into the entertainment and music industries. If you like your information presented in a graphic manner, you could also take a look at Google Earth Infographic and see Google as a superhero.
