Google – The Genesis of The Genius
April 12, 2013
It was way back in 1996, when two PhD students at Stanford University discovered, through a research project, what we now know as, “Google”.
See, back in these days, when the Spice Girls were topping the charts, and gas was $1.22 a gallon, Search Engines were ranking websites based on the amount of times a search term was represented on a page. These two men put their noggins together to determine that there must be a better way to rank websites. They theorized about ways to better compare websites and developed a new technology called, “PageRank”. With Page Rank, relevance was determined, not only, by the number of pages on a website, but the importance of the pages that linked back to the original website. This new search engine was appropriately named, “BackRub” because of the newly incorporated backlink analysis that was used to estimate the value of a website. As you know by now, the name was later changed to Google. Why, Google, you ask? According to Wikepedia, “originating from a misspelling of the word “googol“, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people”.
The domain for Google was registered September 15, 1997 and the company became incorporated the following September. In May 2011, Google surpassed 1 billion unique monthly visitors and in January 2013, Google announced that it had reached $50 billion in annual revenue for 2012. This was an improvement from $38 billion in 2011. Today, Google is the leading search engine, dominating over 67% of all searches. While it has provided us with many challenges, as SEOs, I think we would all agree that we certainly have developed a fondness for Google, however I personally wish they would have kept their original moniker, “BackRub”. “Hey Jori, what’s the capital of Zimbabwe?” “I dunno, lemme BackRub that!”
Jori Stevian is an Account Manager at SEOhaus. If you would like to stay up-to-date on all of the latest SEO industry news and tips, you can subscribe to our blog here. Thanks for reading the SEOhaus blog!