Before Google:
Let’s go back to 1998, the year Google was born, to look at how the internet operated before Sergey and Page introduced us to searching with PageRank. In its early years, the World Wide Web just consisted of a simple directory of sites and pages on it. There was no way to search for the information you were looking for unless you knew the name of the website. AOL, Hotmail, or Netscape were most popular for being used as mailing sites. Archie was the first web search engine and was quickly followed by other tools and search engines such as Veronica, Jughead and Infoseek, and Jumpstation. Yahoo! was the most popular search engine along with others like Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista. Internet Explorer was used and has been overtaken by Google chrome now. However, the algorithms of all these search engines had limitations at that time. There was much room for an improved and more efficient search engine.
The beginning of Google
It
all begins when the founders of Google, Larry Page, and Sergey
Brin met in 1995 at Stanford University. Page, who was considering
joining Stanford for a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and Brin who was already a
Ph.D. student at the university, were assigned to show him around the campus.
The two of them did not click immediately, in fact, they completely disagreed
with each other on a number of things.
This article is copy protected!
|
Eventually,
they became not only friends but worked together on a research project called
BackRub. Soon after BackRub was renamed “Google” in 1998. The name Google is an
intentional misspelling of Googol which means 1 followed by a hundred zeros i.e
10100.
The
project was all about exploring backlinks. Their main idea was that a search
engine could rank pages based on how many links from other pages led to that
page. Based on this they developed an algorithm known as PageRank. It is Google
search’s fundamental algorithm.
Recognition and Success
of Google Search engine
Soon
after, Google caught its attention not only by the academic community but by
Silicon Valley investors as well. Through an investment from Andy Bechtolsheim,
Google Inc.
Google
outgrew the garage where it initially started and eventually moved to its
current headquarters, “The Googleplex” in Mountain View, California and it
became the multi-billion-dollar company that it is today.
Improvements in Google Search over
the years:
In
2010, Google developed a new search architecture, called ‘caffeine’
which significantly improved its speed and allowed continuous indexing which
meant search results were more up to date than before.
In
2013, there was a major update in Google’s search algorithm. This update was
known as ‘hummingbird’ and gave more importance to the language and
context of a query rather than the individual keywords. As a result, search
results were more accurate and natural.
The ‘Medic’ Search algorithm update of 2018 was aimed to
target websites that contain misinformation especially medical and
health-related websites since wrong information on these topics can have severe
consequences.
Google’s search engine, Google Search which is more commonly known as just Google is the most visited website in the world (Source: Alexa). 92% share of the worldwide search engine market belongs to Google. Google has further launched many applications over the years like Google shopping, Google books, maps, Google photos, Google meet, and many more. Today, Google makes hundreds of products used by billions of people across the globe, from YouTube and Android to Gmail and, of course, Google search.
This article is written by Umm E Aiman Jalali, one of the contributors at the School of Literature.
