In the old days, dates fell into one of two categories: BC and AD. Now the relevant categories are BG. and AG: Before and After Google. The critical date was 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched their PageRank system for rating web pages. It was an epochal moment. No British child knows there was once a world without Google. In fact most would be astonished that people were able to get along without it.Google is 10 years old today and it has celebrated by upsetting the world’s applecart – again. Last week it entered the browser market by releasing a beta (ie test) version of its own web browser – Google Chrome. On the face of it, this might not seem a big deal: after all, the once-moribund browser market is getting pretty crowded with Microsoft’s revitalised Internet Explorer (which still has about 70 per cent of the market) being jostled by Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, Flock and others.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/07/google.internetTen years of Google
How did one company become such a part of our lives, so fast? By Robert ColvileA decade ago, two graduate students from Stanford University in California sat in a Burger King, having breakfast. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were celebrating, albeit frugally: their plan to turn a novel technique for mapping the internet into a business had attracted its first $100,000 of funding. The payee’s name on the cheque – the name of the company they would formally found on September 7, 1998 – had been agreed that morning: “Google, Inc”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/09/06/dlgoog106.xml