- Founded in Sep ’98 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google started as a PhD project nicknamed as “BackRub” at Stanford University, California
- Initially involved a “third founder”, Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who left before Google was officially founded as a company
- Renamed to Google in 1997, which originated from a misspelling of the word “googol”, which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeros
- In 1998, Google was serving 10,000 searches queries per day. By the end of 2006, that same amount was served in a single second
- Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on an average, which translates to:
– Over 3.5 billion searches per day worldwide
– 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide
- In 1999, it took Google one month to crawl and build an index of about 50 million pages
- In 2012, the same task was done in less than one minute
- In September 1999, one year after being launched, Google was already answering 3.5 million search queries daily
- 16% to 20% of queries that get asked every day have never been asked before
- Every query has to travel on average 1,500 miles to a data center and back to return the answer to the user
- A single Google query uses 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds to retrieve an answer
- After expanding significantly in the first decade of the 21st century, Google’s search volume growth rate started to decline in 2009 and 2010, and is currently estimated to be at around 10% per year
- In the start-up phase growth was phenomenal, with a 17,000% year to year increase in search volume between 1998 and 1999, 1000% between 1999 and 2000, and 200% between 2000 and 2001
- Google search continued to grow at rates of between 40% to 60% between 2001 and 2009, when it started to slow down stabilizing at a 10% to 15% rate in recent years
- In Aug 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet’s leading subsidiary
Reference Links
https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
