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Google.com is registered as a domain on September 15. The name—a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros—reflects Larry and Sergey's mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
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Page launches a monthly "Google Friends Newsletter" to inform fans about company news. (They've since shut down Google Friends Newsletter in favor of blogs, Google+ and other methods of sharing news.)
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Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn't exist yet—a company called Google Inc.
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Before heading to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, Page and Brin incorporate the iconic Man into the logo to keep people informed about where the Google crew would be for a few days.
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On September 4, Google files for incorporation in California. Page and Brin open a bank account in the newly-established company's name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim's check. Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki's garage on Santa Margarita Ave., Menlo Park, Calif. Page and Brin hire their first employee. Craig Silverstein is a fellow CS grad student at Stanford who works at Google for 10+ years before joining education startup Khan Academy.
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Google outgrows their garage office and move to new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just eight employees.
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Yoshka, the first "company" dog, comes to work with the senior vice president of operations, Urs Hölzle.
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Google's first press release announces a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board.
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They move to their first Mountain View location: 2400 Bayshore. Mountain View is a few miles south of Stanford University, and north of the older towns of Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose.
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Google hires their first chef, Charlie Ayers (his previous claim to fame was catering for the Grateful Dead; he now owns a cafe in Palo Alto). Today Google's food programs focus on providing healthy, sustainably sourced food to fuel Googlers around the world.
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They announce the MentalPlex: Google's ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. Thus begins their annual foray in the Silicon Valley tradition of April 1 hoaxes.
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Google wins their first Webby Awards: Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples' Voice (voted by users). They run a series of doodles featuring a little alien—our first doodle series and the first doodle not associated with any particular event. The first 10 language versions of Google.com are released: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. Today, search is available in 150+ languages.
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Google New York starts in a Starbucks on 86th Street with a one-person sales "team." Today, more than 4,000 Googlers work in our New York office, a former Port Authority building at 111 Eighth Avenue. Google start offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean—bringing our total number of supported languages to 15.
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Google AdWords launches with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback. The first doodle by a guest artist, Lorie Loeb, goes live. Since then, many artists have lent their talents to the Google homepage, from Wayne Thiebaud to Christoph Niemann to Eric Carle.
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Google Toolbar is released—a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google homepage.
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In their first public acquisition, they acquire Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service, an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. We add search and browse features and launch it as Google Groups.
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Eric Schmidt is named chairman of the board of directors.
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Swedish Chef becomes a language preference in search. Google offers several "joke" languages, including Klingon (language of a member of a warlike humanoid alien species in the television series Star Trek and its derivatives and sequels).
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Google Images launches, initially offering access to 250 million images.
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Google releases their first annual Google Zeitgeist, a visual look at what millions of people searched for over the year just ending. It's a revealing look at the year that was, from "Harry Potter" to "Osama Bin Laden." They continue to release Zeitgeist every year.
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Google releases the first set of Google APIs, enabling developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and program in their favorite environment, including Java, Perl and Visual Studio.
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Google News launches with 4,000 news sources. Today Google News includes 50,000+ news sources, with 70 regional editions in different languages. All told, Google News and other services send publishers 6 billion clicks per month as of 2012.
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Google acquires Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger. Nearly as old as Google itself (Blogger started in 1999), today more than 300 million people visit Blogger every month.
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Registration opens for programmers to compete for cash prizes and recognition at the first ever Code Jam. Today, Google Code Jam attracts tens of thousands of contestants each year, and the finals have traveled to Tokyo, Dublin, London and New York City.
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Google launches Google Print (now known as Google Books), indexing small excerpts from books to appear in search results. In 2004, the program expands through digital scanning partnerships with libraries. To date, they've scanned more than 20 million books.
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Google moves to the new "Googleplex" at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View with 800+ employees. They introduce Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps, and directions. (Eventually, Local is combined with Google Maps.)
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Google launches Gmail on April Fools' Day. At first invite-only, today it boasts more than 425 million users.
Fun fact: their internal code name for Gmail was "Caribou," inspired by a Dilbert cartoon. The Official Google Blog goes live. Today, they offer a wide variety of ways—including Google+ pages and Twitter accounts—for people to get news from Google, in many different languages. -
They're Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock takes place on Wall Street. Opening price: $85 per share.
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Google acquires Picasa, which helps people organize and display photos online.
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Google launches Google Scholar in beta. This free service helps people search scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
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Google establishes Google.org, dedicated to the idea that technology can help make the world a better place.
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Google Maps goes live. Just two months later, they add satellite views and directions to the product.
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Google Maps comes to mobile phones in the U.S., offering driving directions and local information to people on the go. Their first Google Maps release in Europe is geared to U.K. users. France, Germany, Italy and Spain follow in 2006. Today, they offer driving directions in 190+ countries around the world. The first video goes up on YouTube (not yet part of Google). Today, 100+ hours of video are uploaded every minute and people watch 6 billion hours of video per month!
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Google Mobile Web Search is released. Google unveils Google Earth, a satellite imagery-based mapping service that lets you take a virtual journey to any location in the world. The Google Maps API is released; developers can embed Google Maps on many kinds of mapping services and sites. Today there are 1 million active websites and apps using the API, reaching 1 billion people every week.
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Google launches Google Talk, a downloadable application that lets Gmail users to talk or instant message with friends quickly and easily; Chat comes to Gmail the following year. In 2013, they announce that Talk will be rolled into Hangouts, Google's new single communications system.
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We launch Google Calendar to help you keep track of events, special occasions and appointments, and to share schedules with others. Google Translate launches, offering translations between Arabic and English. Today our machine translation service provides translations between 70+ different languages.
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Google announces their acquisition of YouTube.
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Google adds traffic information to Google Maps for 30+ cities around the U.S. Today, live traffic data is available in 50+ countries, covering highways, streets and more in 600+ major cities.
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The first "gBikes" appear on campus, giving Googlers an efficient, convenient and healthy way to get to and from meetings. Today around 700 bikes are on campus at any given moment—just one sign of Google's cycling-friendly culture.
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Street View debuts in Google Maps in five U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver. Today, Street View is available in more than 50 countries.
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Google installs solar panels on our Mountain View campus—the largest corporate solar panel installation of its kind at the time. Today the solar panels power 30 percent of the buildings they sit on. They unveil a new green initiative aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. We later retire the RechargeIT initiative, though we continue to offer electric vehicles as part of our employee car sharing service.
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We announce Android—the first open platform for mobile devices—and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance.
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Google hosts the first Google I/O, their annual developer conference, in San Francisco. I/O has grown since then; in addition to the thousands of developers who join them in person every year, millions of people tune in via live stream to hear the latest news on products.
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The first downloadable iPhone app, enables quicker mobile searching, and debuts with the launch of the Apple 3G iPhone.
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Google Suggest (later called Autocomplete) arrives on Google.com, helping formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and reducing keystrokes.
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T-Mobile announces the G1, the first phone built on the Android operating system. Google Chrome becomes available for download, one day after a comic book announcing our new browser leaks onto the web. Five years later, Chrome boasts more than 750 million users.
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Google launches Voice Search on Android. Android users can start searching by voice with the touch of a button, making mobile web surfing easy and fast.
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Google announces that we're developing Google Chrome OS, an open source, lightweight operating system initially targeted at laptops.
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Google Maps Navigation is a turn-by-turn GPS navigation system with 3D views, voice guidance and live traffic data.
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Just in time for the holidays they roll out Mac and Linux versions of Google Chrome, as well as extensions for Chrome in Windows and Linux (all in beta).
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Google introduces the Nexus One to show what's possible on Android devices. The Nexus line of devices has since grown and now includes tablets as well as phones.
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Bike directions and bike trail data come to Google Maps. Today, there are more than 330,000 miles (530,000 kilometers) of biking trails and paths in Google Maps to help you get around on your two wheels.
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In celebration of PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, we release our first-ever playable doodle, complete with all 256 levels and Ms. PAC-MAN.
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Google Instant shows you search results as you type so you can quickly get to the information you’re looking for.
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Google announces they've developed technology for cars that can drive themselves; they think self-driving cars can help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions. Their automated cars have since logged more than 500,000 miles on the road.
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Google introduces an advanced opt-in security feature called 2-step verification to help people keep their Google Accounts secure. 2-step verification is now available in 40 languages and 150+ countries.
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Larry Page takes over as CEO—10 years after he last held the title. Eric Schmidt becomes executive chairman.
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Google Wallet makes it convenient to shop in-store, online or on the go, and helps merchants simplify the checkout experience. Google announces the first Chromebooks from partners Samsung and Acer. Chromebooks are designed to be fast, simple, secure and easy to keep updated.
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Chrome launches on Android, so you can take the same simple, fast and secure web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices. Three months later they launch Chrome on iOS.
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Project Glass is unveiled. Google Drive launches, enabling you to create, share, collaborate and keep your files—including videos, photos, Google Docs and PDFs—all in one place.
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Google acquires Motorola Mobility. They expand our Transparency Report with a new section on copyright, providing information on the number of requests we get from copyright owners to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. They transition Google Product Search to Google Shopping to help people research products and connect directly with merchants to make purchases.
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Google announces Google Now, which brings you the information you need, before you even ask, like what today’s weather will be like, how much traffic to expect on your way to work or your favorite team's score while they’re playing.
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The world sees the Olympics live on YouTube for the first time. Viewers watched a total of 230 million video streams, and our partnership with NBC makes it the most live-streamed Olympics to date.
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Google begins installing Google Fiber—ultra-high speed Internet access that is up to 100 times faster than today’s average broadband—for our first customers in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City Missouri. The next year, we announce Fiber in Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah.
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Psy’s Gangnam Style becomes the most-watched video of all time—the first and only YouTube video to reach 1 billion views.
