In 1996, then PhD students Larry Paige and Surgey Brin a began a small research project at Stanford University. In 1999, Google issued a press release that included their mission statement which was ,"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." I think that we, as a society, take for granted how easily accessible Google has made this inconceivably enormous amount of information at our fingertips. The primary goal of Google has always been and will remain to be, giving the user the most relevant results to any search. Over the past ten years Google has gradually integrated all different forms of media into their search results pages.

Google's founders had a theory that would later revolutionize the way that search engines would rank results. By analyzing the relationships between websites and the number of sites that linked back to a particular site and of course how important the sites linking to it were. The pair believed that this new system, that they named "Page Rank" was a far better way of offering search results.

 

One of Google's very first changes came about as a result of many users in 1999 had complaints that all of their search results were coming from the same domain. The resulting change was issued in February of 2000 and was aptly named "Host crowding" which would only allow up to two results from any single host name. The host name is the part of any URL after the www. And before any backslash subdomain (an example of a host name is, google.com). This alteration in the search results cleaned up the search engine results page or SERP and offered far more diverse results as well. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before scammers found ways around the host crowding fix, they would simply create multiple subdomains. So, it didn't take the folks at Google very long to alter their code to prevent people from this form of abuse of sub domains.

After considering various ways to monetize their website, Google finally devised a way to do it without blatant in your face advertisements just plastered all over their website. In 2000, Google introduced Google Adwords. This was a way for anyone with a business or even just a monetized website or blog to get a decent amount of exposure, even if they had no previous SEO experience. At the same time Google profits handsomely from the Adwords system. So as not to interfere with the fledgling search engine, they have always made it a point to make the ads clearly distinguishable from the search results.

Google had realized, in the aftermath of 9/11 that their system was woefully inadequate when it came to delivering newsworthy information in an acceptably timely fashion. People worldwide were searching for up to the minute information about the tragedy at hand and having indexed the web a month earlier, Google had no information to offer. As you can imagine, this was quite a blow to Google. While they quickly patched links in to the major news outlets around the world, this was ultimately the beginning of Google news.

As users continuously began to place an ever increasing amount of trust in the search engine, their expectations also grew. Early in 2001, Google released a new image search capability which quickly evolved into the placement of images within the search engine results page. Later on in 2002, Universal search was born, which brought with it, the many different forms of media available in search results that we are familiar with today. As simple as this sounds, it came about as the result of many hours of work by teams of researchers, code writers and the many other people that make this sort of thing possible. The algorithms involved with Universal search were not easily conceived. They were comparing apples to oranges, so to speak. They teams at Google had to find a way to rank images first, then a way to compare these results to the multitude of results from the already existing categories.

More recently, Google has been focusing their energy more on speed. Their goal was to offer their users instant results. Bringing their users results before they are even finished entering their query, Google instant came into fruition in 2010. As useful as it may seem to be, users seem to be ignoring it.

As mobile applications seem to be taking root as the wave of the future, Google will of course follow suit. Recent developments indicate a change in the way we search as mobile users are quickly gaining in numbers. With the mobile applications requiring more of a hands free approach, voice search as well as image search are looking quite feasible. Voice search is pretty self explanatory, Image search is pretty interesting. The way it works is, you take a picture of what ever it is the you want information about and viola.

With its many innovations over the past decade, we can only begin to imagine what the future will bring for Google, the only thing that is pretty much guaranteed is that Google isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Thanks Google.

Comments ( 6 ) Add Comments

Ben Tseitlin

Its hard to believe how far that Google has come over the past 10 years. It is also hard to imagine where we would be without Google's

Jon Orlin

Although Google has come a long way in its time It is even harder to try to imagine where they will take us in the ten years to come.

Dinise Sasse

With the amount of attention that is being placed on the mobile applications these days, I would put my money on Google going in that direction

Johnathan Abraham

Google has already begun their run at expanding their monopoly into the realm of mobile software and applications. Before long Google will own the entire internet.

Micheal Krajewski

Google already owns half of the internet I'm exaggerating of course, but they do seem to be buying up any company that begins to show the slightest little bit of promise of profitability.

Kaspars Dancis Google

I agree with that Google is buying up all of the other companies, I just wonder how long it will be before Google buys up Facebook or the unthinkable, Facebook buys out.