Google’s humble beginnigs
In little over two decades Google has grown from a college side-project to become the world’s favourite search engine. Today Google is valued in the billions and its shares are some of the best performing on the trading floor. But Google isn’t just a story of financial success; it’s their results that really count.
From the get-go Google did things differently. By concentrating on the speed and accuracy of the results, rather than money-making aspects of the business, Google quickly won the public’s trust. Not only did Google understand what people wanted, they also understood the future importance of search.
Innovative thinking and heavy investment in hardware and technology has set Google so far ahead of the competition that their position as the global search titan looks safe for some time to come.
Google’s philosophy is pure at heart
Google began life in 1995 as a research project for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both students at Stanford University. They set about devising a way of retrieving relevant information from the growing volume of data on the web. Search was in its infancy and they decided on a new approach based on analysing backlinks.
Three years later they had indexed close to 60 million pages and were named one of the ‘Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines’ by PC Magazine…despite the fact that they were still working out of a friend’s garage. By June 2000 Google had become the world’s largest search engine with a billion-page index and 18 million user queries a day. By 2013 Google had indexed a staggering 30 trillion pages and by the beginning of 2017 the number had risen to 130 trillion individual pages.
Google may joke that they are the ‘only company in the world whose stated goal is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible’, but behind this quip lie the keys to Google’s success. Google’s philosophy is to focus on the user, and what searchers want are the best possible results in the fastest possible time.
Google set out to do just one thing, but do it really, really well. While Yahoo! and MSN were busy cluttering up their homepages with horoscopes and daily recipes, Google went minimal. Click on Google and you get a big white screen with a search box in the middle. It’s impossible not to know what Google’s all about.
Google has changed the face of search and its rivals have still got a lot of catching up to do.
Is Google really the world’s most popular search engine?
So what’s all the fuss about Google? Surely there are plenty of other search engines out there? The number of search engines increases day by day, but few have become a household name and only Google has made it into the dictionary (both as a noun and a verb). If you are searching for something online you ‘Google it’, you don’t ‘Bing it or ‘Yahoo! it’, it somehow doesn’t sound quite right… yet ‘to Google’ makes perfect sense.
Google owes much of its success to a combination of interface simplicity and superior search technology. Put simply it’s easy to use and the results are good. 2017 stats show reveal that Google controls 72.46 % of the global search market, with an estimated 1.6 billion visits a month compared to 400 million for Bing and 300 million for Yahoo.
Google is a true search titan, dominating the marketplace in the Western World and holding a sizeable chunk of the global market. Get to the top of Google and you’ve got unparalleled access to the global market.
Throughout our blog we focus on Google, but because we follow good practice guidelines we also get great results in the other search engines. Google is currently so far ahead of the competition it looks like they will continue to reign over the search market for some time to come… which is why we’ve decided to crack the toughest nut first.
