From search to so much more. This is how Google evolved to a leading tech monster
In 1998, two young software engineers - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - wanted to create a smart search engine that provided more precise answers to people’s search queries.
At the time, the research project was BackRub and gave origin to PageRank, the algorithm behind Google, named after a misspelled version of the number Googol (number 1 followed by 100 zeros) selected for large quantities of information the search engine was intended to provide.
Google’s search engine was considered a game changer at the time. While other search engines provided “White pages” like listings, Google’s search engine went one step deeper by ranking searches by relevance. Thus, the term “Googling” because of a popular phrase.
Building an Advertising Empire with Adwords
Like many startups, Google started with less than desired income, it took them 3 years to show profit.
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This was possible thanks to the introduction of Adwords, a self-service advertisement program that allowed users to promote their websites through Google’s search results.
Until this day, Adwords advertising platform has come to be the biggest money maker for Google. In fact, Adword brought in a total of $225 billion in 2022. This makes Google one of the largest advertising platforms in the world.
Just like PageRank has become more sophisticated over the years, Adwords has also developed into a more complex platform, with options to keep track of campaigns and learn from their results with additional tools like AdSense, that allows websites to gain money through Google’s advertisements.
Winning By Thinking Outside the Box
Google is investing in innovation to gain a wider moat on its businesses. That includes encouraging employees to think outside the box and come up with new ideas.
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The company is known to give many perks to their employees, that go from simple things like flexible working hours to campus-like installations that include meals, doctor visits, gyms among other amenities.
Being the “side projects” a benefit that encourages their employees to work 20% of their time in other ventures different to their main job at the company.
The company also invests heavily in research and development, which allows it to stay ahead of the competition.
In fact, some of the most successful products to come from Google are in-house products such as Google Docs and GMail.
Gmail, which at the beginning was an invitation only email service, became the first platform to offer a large amount of storage space for free. This allowed Gmail to become one of the largest email services online.
Mission-driven growth
Although the company started as a search engine, their mission statement: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”, is way more ambitious.
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