Google turns 25 years today, and the search engine – developed in a garage by two young Americans – has made a massive impact on everyday life like few other inventions in human history.
It has grown to be the world’s most popular website, with the term “Just Google it” now part of everyday language. And the value of its parent company Alphabet is today worth US1.7 trillion (AUD$2.6 trillion).
Here is a look at the origins of the tech behometh and what the future may hold for it.
In 1995, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in Calfornia, where graduate student Brin gives prospective student Page a tour.
One year later, the pair began working on a new search engine for the Internet. Initially, the search engine was known as BackRub because it depended on backlinks to estimate the importance of sites.
It later became Google, with the name derived from the word “googol” – a term for the number one, followed by 100 zeros.
On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed documents with the state of California to officially found their company Google.
The first recorded Google search happened that year when Page and Brin were demonstrating the accuracy of Google compared with other search engines.
In a bid to impress famous Silicon Valley scientist John Hennessy, they asked him to type in the name Gerhard Casper, who was the then president of Stanford University.
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A previous search on rival search engine AltaVista had produced results for the 1995 children’s movie Casper the Friendly Ghost, but Hennessy was shocked and delighted when Google returned links to the human Gerhard Casper.
By 1999, Page and Brin moved their company from a Californian garage to state-of-the-art offices at Mountain View, California.
The following two decades saw Google diversify into nearly every area of technology.
It launched and acquired countless products and services including smartphones, software, hardware, driverless cars and YouTube.
But can it survive the challenge of Artificial Intelligence, notably ChatGPT, the viral AI chatbot launched last November, which was touted as a ‘Google Killer’?
Technology expert Mark Sanderson, of RMIT University in Melbourne, believes Google’s dominance will be hard to dislodge, despite the emergence of AI.
“Generative systems make mistakes, make hallucinations, they get things wrong. And search engine users have a very low tolerance of error.” he told 9news.com.au.
“And so I think they will have to be a lot more accurate before they are widely adopted.”
