Google is seven years old. How did it all happen so quickly?

Where did Google come from? I remember coming across it and it looked like a Beta, a preview of something bigger yet to come. By then we were all using HotBot for tech searches, Alta Vista was getting clogged with rubbish, so Google seemed something new, something calmer. I got into the habit of using Google. Its clear white space has such a change from the hot, hip colours of Hot Bot and the noise of all the other 'portals'. I was not alone, all my colleagues were using it and even my customers start using it, it was so much quicker at getting at something useful.

But there were no ads pushing Google. That was the strangest thing, it was there and people just continued to use it and to tell their friends and colleagues. This was Internet boom time and everything and one was spending, rushing headlong into their own Klondike gold rush of ad spend. But Google just grew, it didn't spend online, it didn't spend in magazines or on poster boards, instead it built its technologies and got better, a lot better at what it did.

It was wierd, its white page had spread quietly across screens. It had become the search, Google was search. We were looking at this white screen and now we couldn't go anywhere else. There was nothing else we could use. Okay, we didn't spend the long hours we do on Ebay, they were quick visits, but the numbers were enormous. The technology had become the story, this was phenomenal technology that worked.

But how did they do it, how did Google bring back such good results. It became the start of a new industry - the Google watchers, the Google cheaters, the Google analysts. This was big money since high 'rankings' had high value and could make or break small etailers. Within the industry, we all worked hard to figure out its moving rules and regulations. It had become the lawmaker.

Then it came rather quirkily to the Stock Market. The next phase of the Google phenomenon had begun. It has been a huge stock and now many speculate on just how high the stock can go. Whilst others will invest in technologies and the marketplace must change or evolve, such is their market dominance that most analysts continue to push the stock.

And how do we, the users, feel as we continue to type our words into that white search box. For some, there is probably an increased sense of forboding, since Google seems to know a lot about us, about even our most private searches and browsing habits. Where does all this data go? We can speculate about vast warehouses filled with electronic data but we're a little unclear on who might be using it and whether it's really that useful or threatening after all. To most of us it still seems a pretty friendly company, it's doing and sharing a lot of clever things. They have the money now, they can build wonderful fun applications like the Google Maps and buy up all the best engineers.

But what about the next seven years, there's the interesting bit!

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We wanted something special for our birthday…
9/26/2005 09:14:00 PM
Posted by Anna Patterson, Software Engineer

Google opened its doors in September 1998, and we’ve been pursuing one mission ever since: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. For our seventh birthday, we are giving you a newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index.

I’m proud of everything we’ve accomplished in the years since Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the first Google data center in Larry’s dorm room at Stanford. Today, along with web search based on Larry and Sergey’s original BackRub search engine, we offer specialized search for everything from satellite images to academic papers, local business info to your own computer. We’ve also built software for email and mobile services, photo management and computer-to-computer voice calling, to name just a few things.

But search remains our heart and soul, so I’m especially pleased by this latest expansion of our index, which makes Google more than 3 times larger than any other search engine. See for yourself how effective the new Google search index can be. Come up with a search query that's special to you (your name, your elementary school, and your favorite animal, for example) - a combination of words that is likely to exist on just a few web pages out of the billions we've indexed, a few needles scattered in the Internet’s endless haystack. Ready? Let’s go.

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