It’s hard to believe, but Google turned 25 today. Depending on how old you are, this may either seem like a much longer time than you expected or much shorter than you thought. As someone who grew up with Google (I turned 29 this year), it’s definitely hard to imagine that there ever existed a world without the internet-defining search engine. Yet here we are, only 25 years later. So, it’s time for a look back at how Google became the internet behemoth it is today.

First off, we need to preface the celebrations with a caveat: Technically, Google wasn’t founded on September 27, 1998, but the company has historically used this day to celebrate its birthday. The more correct date is September 4, 1998, or September 7, 1998. That explains why some of the celebrations started early, with the company publishing retrospectives as early as on September 1 this year. One thing is clear from all this, though: Google was started in September 1998, and as such, it is now 25 years old — the company itself celebrates the day on its blog today.

The early days

The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, back when they were still studying at Stanford in California. In fact, Google initially lived on Stanford servers, with early versions of the search engine accessible as a Stanford subdomain. This makes sense as Google was the founders’ PhD project, wanting to find out how to index and find information on the growing World Wide Web back in the day.

The idea to consider the number of backlinks a website has, as in, other websites referring to it with links, was something that really made it possible to scale Google like no other search engine before it and helped it push authoritative sources to the top of results without much human intervention. The search engine was initially called “BackRub” for that exact reason.

Being able to look up all sorts of information with a simple search query was unheard of until Google and its earlier competitors came along

Google was initially fully free to use, and the company only started monetizing it with advertisements in the early 2000s. Advertisers could buy certain keywords, allowing them to be shown in a visually distinct style alongside dynamic search results. In that same decade, the company also adopted its now forgotten “Don’t be evil” mantra when it filed for IPO in 2004, with Google promising to bring improvements to the world even when it meant forgoing short-term gains.

Becoming Goliath

In the following years, the company quickly grew to become the behemoth we know today. It purchased YouTube in 2006, making it own the de-facto standard for video content creation on the internet. Only two years later, the company finally launched Android in 2008 (which it bought when it was still a camera operating system in 2005), ushering in the era of smartphones we know today. Apple may have invented the iPhone and the modern smartphone, but Google adopted the core ideas, improved on them, and made them available to the masses with great phones at all price point.

Here’s what Gmail used to look like on Android back in 2010

The company made some other smart decisions, like the introduction of Gmail with 1GB of free storage — unheard of at the time — quickly making many people switch to the brand-new service. Then there is the introduction of its own browser, Chrome, which quickly became the option almost everyone picks on their computer. It also ventured into the tablet and laptop markets with Android for tablets and ChromeOS, even if the former likely never became as successful as the company hoped it would.

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows

Along the way, the company also had to make some hard decisions on the profitability of individual services. Many people are still mourning the loss of key products, like Google Reader, Google Plus, Inbox, and, more recently, Stadia. Innovative ideas like Google Now, which surfaced key information at the right time on your phone, made way for the more advertising-friendly Google Discover feed. Decisions like this made clear that the company is moving away from its “Don’t be evil” motto, looking more at its bottom line than what is right for users.

Source: Dana Fried

Just some of the products Google killed over the years, part of the company’s Halloween decoration in 2019

The next few years only cemented Google’s position in the world. Its advertising business has grown to become the de-facto standard on the internet, with the company regularly scrutinized by regulators for owning every part of the advertising vertical. The word “googling” has become synonymous with web search. Virtually everyone using an Android phone has a Google account, and it’s hard to get by the company even on other platforms.

The winding road ahead

The current decade seems to spell the most trouble for the company. Google is scrambling to find a good answer to the rise of generative AI, with companies like Microsoft and OpenAI working hard to be the winners in the race to an everything AI and Google scrambling to keep up. At the same time, Google needs to thwart off regulatory scrutiny, with some countries and regions looking into breaking up the company or at least making it lose its monopolistic grip on some of the markets it dominates.

It will certainly be interesting to see what the next few years will bring to the table. We will see where the next 25 years will take the company, but it certainly won’t be easy. For now, the company can certainly celebrate its milestones from the past 25 years — even if not all of its decisions and business practices are agreeable for consumers.