Brandon Carter

Around a year ago, Google celebrated its 20th birthday! An incredible feat indeed! From humble beginnings, the company has expanded into online advertising, cloud computing, software, and hardware solutions. Alexa, a company that monitors web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the world the domain of which you can find here. Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it accessible to anyone, anywhere". Google, is a play on words of "googol" which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. In 1998 Larry launched a newsletter called "Google Friends Newsletter" to let fans know about the company. This newsletter has since been replaced by Google+. In 1999, google moved from its garage to 165 University Avenue, Palo Alto. At this time the team consisted of only eight employees. Also, their first most important team member, Yoshka the dog, joined the team. 2005 was another defining year in Google's history. Google Maps was born with satellite imagery and directions added a few months later. YouTube's (not yet part of Google) first video went online. Phone apps became a big part of Google's strategy in 2005 with search software and Google Maps going to mobile platforms. Google Earth came out in the summer of 2005. Google Analytics was also created to help developers measure their marketing impact and is still being used today. A couple of offices opened in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. Google's mission to organize data continued with Google Calendar and Google Finance. "Google Trends" launched. Youtube was acquired by Google this year. Google Chrome was introduced in 2008 and became one of the most used web browsers. In 2009 Google released Google Voice. Google also hired some goats to clean up their Googleplex campus grounds to clear brush and reduce fire hazards. From then and on, the sky was the limit. In 2013, Google topped up their commitment to renewable energy by investing $200 million in a wind farm in Texas. And we now come to today. Google is the most used search engine and is, all in all, one of the largest corporations in the world.