Google turns 15 today: All you need to know

“Just Google it. Am pinging you on G-chat.” These are some of phrases that we’re used to now. Google, the search engine giant that turns 15 today seems like it has been a part of our lives forever.

Of course Google isn’t just about search anymore. Google is now ubiquitous with our Internet lives from Gmail to Google Plus to YouTube to Google Maps. Of course if you have a smartphone chances are it is an Android phone.

On Google’s 15th birthday, we take a look at everything you need to know about the company.

1. Birthday:Even though Google is celebrating 27 September as its 15th birthday, the company actually came into being on 4 September, 1998. In fact till 2004, Google was celebrating 7 September as it’s birthday date which is when the company was officially incorporated. From 2005, the company began celebrating it’s birthday on 27 September to coincide with the announcement with record number of pages that they were indexing.

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If truth being told Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on Google in 1996 which was called BackRub then. By that date Google is 17 today. So yes, the Google birthday is a confusing story – if you don’t believe us… just google it.

[caption id=“attachment_1137183” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A celebratory Google birthday cake is seen. Reuters[/caption]

2. Standford Project: Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on Google as part of research project when they were both PhD students at Standford. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.

3. First funding: The first funding Google received was in August 1998. Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, gave the co-founder $100,000 before Google was even incorporated.

4. Brin and Page tried to sell Google to Excite CEO George Bell for $1 million. But he rejected the offer. Surely the duo aren’t complaining now.

5. IPO in 2004: Google’s IPO was debuted on Nasdaq market on 19 August, 2004. Ahead of the IPO, Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave an interview to Playboy magazine which drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Google was valued at $23 billion then.

6. Earth: In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole which developed Earth Viewer, that allowed for a three-dimensional view of the Earth. Google renamed the service to Google Earth in 2005. In 2008, google introduced Google Street View – a technology that provides panoramic views from positions along many streets in the world.

7. Google bought YouTube in 2006. YouTube was created by three former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim in February 2005. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Recently Google introduced Google Plus comments in YouTube.

8. Mobile: Google financially backed and later bought in Android in 2005. Android now runs on nearly 1 billion smartdevices in the world. The first Android phone, however, came out after Apple’s iPhone which was released in 2007. The first Android phone was the HTC Dream and was released in October 2008.

9. Email: Gmail was launched on 1 April 2004. It was created by Paul Buchheit. On the first anniversary of Gmail, Google announced that it would offer users 1 GB of space.

10. Motto: Incidentally Buchheit also suggested the company’s now-famous motto “Don’t be evil” in a 2000 meeting on company values. However, the motto seems to have disappeared over time.

11. Browser: Google Chrome first released as a beta version for Windows on 2 September, 2008, and the full public release was on 11 December, 2008. According to StatsCounter, Chrome has over 36 percent worldwide usage till April 2013, which makes it the most popular browser in the world.

12. Google Plus: Google launched the Google+, a social networking service on 28 June 28, 2011. Initially it was an invitation-only but which soon suspended because of crazy demand. On 6 August, each Google+ member had 150 invitations to give out. From 20 September Google+ opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need for an invitation. Google Plus has surpassed Twitter to become the second biggest social network in the world.

13. The Knowledge Graph: This feature of Google Search was launched in May 2012. This feature draws from a Google-built database of more than 500 million people, places and commonly requested things to provide a summary of vital information along the main search results.

14. Google Drive: This was announced in April 2012. It gives users the option of uploading and accessing all their files, such as videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs etc all on the cloud, which saves space on personal computers. Google docs is an integral feature of Google Drive and currently Google is offering 10 GB data to users on Drive.

15. Hummingbird: Today Google announced a new update to its search Algorithm called Hummingbird. Hummingbird has actually been active for some time and according to Amit Singhal, senior vice president for Search the redesign will affect the analysis of about 90 percent of the search requests that Google gets. Hummingbird is primarily aimed at giving Google’s search engine a better grasp at understanding concepts instead of mere words.

Bonus: Google Reader was launched in 2005. Sadly Google decided to kill in July 2013, sparking a massive online buzz with people wondering why Google was killing the best thing ever.