Google

In the mid-1990s, the explosive growth of the World Wide Web made finding information ever more difficult. Existing search engines — Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo! — ranked pages essentially by keyword frequency, which encouraged manipulation. At Stanford University, two computer science doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, tackled the problem in the framework of a research project called BackRub, launched in 1996. Their intuition, drawn from academic citation indexing, was to evaluate a web page by the number and quality of the links pointing to it. They formalised this idea in an algorithm they called PageRank, detailed in the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" published in 1998. Google Inc. was officially founded on 4 September 1998 in a garage rented in Menlo Park from Susan Wojcicki, thanks to an initial 100,000-dollar cheque from Andy Bechtolsheim and a funding round involving Jeff Bezos and David Cheriton. From its earliest versions the engine stood out for its minimalist interface — a simple search box on a white background — and for the quality of its results. In 2000 AdWords appeared, the pay-per-click advertising platform that would become the company's economic engine. Google then introduced Gmail (2004), Google Maps (2005), the Chrome browser (2008), and acquired Android in 2005, leading to the deployment of the system of the same name from 2008 onwards. Renamed Alphabet in 2015 during a corporate restructuring, Google has durably dominated the global search market with more than 90% share, processes several trillion queries per year and generates a major share of online advertising revenue. Its data centres, powered by a proprietary infrastructure built on Linux, in turn contributed to the rise of the cloud. Larry Page and Sergey Brin handed over operational leadership to Sundar Pichai in 2019. Google embodies, better than any other company, the transformation of an academic project into a planetary infrastructure, and remains one of the pillars of both the Web and Web 2.0 eras.