NEWS | Google

Google is a search engine that started development in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as a research project at Stanford University to find files on the Internet. They quit Stanford, kept working on the project turning it into a business and launching it to the wider world.

Google originally was designed to help people sort quickly through the rapidly growing amount of content being put online in the 1990’s. The primary goal of Google was to provide users with the most relevant, highest quality results based on user search queries.

It started strong and just kept getting better creating a situation where it was able to grow past competitors like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves to become the go-to search engine for the Internet in the space of a few years.

The name Google originated from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

When we refer to ‘Google’ we mean the search engine but of course now there are hundreds of other google related projects, websites and business.

Chief among them is “Google Chrome”, a cross-platform web browser developed by Google and now the most used browsers in the world accounting for 50% of web traffic. Most of Chrome’s source code comes from Google’s free and open-source software project Chromium however Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware.