25 Years of Google. How Has Big G Been For You?
It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Google was founded by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It actually started a couple of years earlier as a research model while the founders were still college graduates.
The original name was supposed to be BackRub, but thankfully they changed it.
My first (hands-off) experience with Google was in late 1999 or early 2000. People were coming into my place of work (motor trade) and selling music CDs with copied covers for roughly £4. About 60% off the retail price of approx. £10. Burning music onto discs from Napster. A peer-to-peer sharing facility.
They were using the Google search facility or its main competitor Ask Jeeves now Ask.com. You also had Yahoo and MSN now has an offshoot Bing. These were all search engines that still exist now in different versions that existed shortly before Google arrived and blew the search engine world apart.
It’s a bit like in most areas of the business world. The early developers get their market share and then someone else comes along and gobbles them up. The video world is a perfect example of where a lot of people thought the Betamax video systems would thrive with their smaller tapes, but it was VHS recorders with their bigger tapes that thrived.
