Google is going to eat your lunch
Stumbling into the Internet community in 1997, Google swiftly climbed up through the competitive market of search engines, eventually culminating in dominating 80% of the search requests (2004) throughout the world. Fueled by an ultra-conservative interface design, Google made its name quickly—and didn't stop there.
Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford, in 1996, the search engine known as Google began its short life as a research project based on "the analysis of the relationships between web sites [to] produce improved results over the basic techniques then in use." Instead of following the path of other engines such as AltaVista or Yahoo!, they relied on the popularity of pages themselves. Simply put: page rankings are determined by the number of external sites linking to the target page.
After forming their thesis, the pair launched an initial form of the engine (then called BackRub) before moving to Stanford's website (google.stanford.edu). By 1998, Google had made its final move to the domain google.com, and Google, Inc. had been formally established. In 1999, AltaVista decided to change their focus to that of a web portal, alienating many users—which Google was more than happy to pick up.
By the year 2000, Google had begun to sell advertisements based on specific keywords, as specified by the client. Following on the success of their graphically minimal interface, these text-based ads played a large part in Google's ability to withstand the dot-com crash. At very low rates per-click, coupled with topic-oriented placement, advertisers quickly began ditching traditional advertising methods for Google's new, innovative methods.
After surviving through the early millennial struggles of their competitors, Google made several quick moves to cement itself in the Internet community. In February of 2003, they acquired the parent company of Blogger, helping to further establish the Google brand, as well as draw more users to its primary services.
While Google claims many of their users with its simple, clean-cut interface and accurate results, in recent years they have managed to attract others through alternate means. Google frequently modifies their interface to reflect cultural holidays—such as April Fool's Day or Thanksgiving—or to commemorate humorous crap, like Star Trek's Klingon or Leet. Recently, Google took advantage of April Fool's Day to publicize the fictional product GoogleGulp (google.com/googlegulp/).
Like Yahoo! before them, Google has also introduced various services outside of their standard search engine. They have successfully tied their technology to various services including web-based email (Gmail), price-comparison (Froogle), international maps (Google Maps), and others. For each of these services, Google's powerful search functionality remains intact—their approach to email storage and management, through Gmail, had many of their peers (such as Yahoo! and Hotmail) fumbling to compete.
More important than any of the technical or professional achievements is the cultural phenomenon of Google. The phrase "to google" has been officially classified as neologism—a phrase, term or word that was recently created to refer to a new concept or invention. In 2002, the American Dialect Society identified the verb as "the most useful word [of the year]." In addition to its use as a verb—meaning, if you were somehow not aware, to conduct a web search—Google has also entered our language as a noun and adjective. Oddly, Google, as a company, does not like the use of its name in such ways, fearing similar to results as Yo-Yo, Kleenex or Xerox.
So, there you have it: a non-humorous, probably erroneous summation of the history, concepts and nature behind the marvel that is Google. Do what you feel is necessary with this information, and make sure you tune in next week—we'll be discussing something nerdy, I promise!