We do not know, dear readers of Tech Princess, if you have ever thought about how many “mythical” things, as young people would say (but do they still say it?) Can happen in garages.
That it is not only the places where vehicles are parked and small maintenance interventions are carried out on objects in the house that decide to stop working.
For example, for years it was said that in the garage of his home in New Jersey Bruce Springsteen had recorded, between 1981 and 1982, the album Nebraska. More recent sources speak of a domestic recording and with modest means, but perhaps not really in the garage (but let’s not spoil the myth of that beautiful record).
What is certain is that, fifteen years after the release of the album, and precisely on September 15, 1997, perhaps something even more important happened in another American garage.
What happened on September 15, 1997
We don’t feel like exaggerating if we say that September 15, 1997 is a date that changed history. No, no major public events, no outbreaks of wars or revolutions or the dismissal of sovereigns.
That day, in a friend’s garage from Menlo Park, two guys registered the Google.com domain.
The friend in question is Susan Wojcicki, current CEO of YouTube. And the two guys are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
A (controversial) anniversary
So, today Google turns 25. Or rather, September 15th is the birthday of domain registration, because the company will celebrate its 25th anniversary on September 27th.. Because? Because that’s the day the company first announced that it registered the indexed page record in its database.
The official birth date of the company, in fact, is 4 September 1998.
Page and Brin’s idea
So Google turns 25, and it’s hardly necessary to say how much it has affected and is affecting the lives of all of us.
It is a sort of door that opens to (almost) infinite possibilities, and is able to resolve issues that embrace every aspect of daily life, from the practical-organizational to the cultural one.
But what was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s original idea?
In 1997 Page and Brin were two doctoral students at Standford University. The two had the desire to create an algorithm capable of generating a ranking of search results made by Internet users. They had already tried it in 1996 with the BackRub search algorithm, but the result was not satisfactory.
The same thing cannot be said for Google, if after 25 years the two, now forty-nine, are among the richest men on the planet.
Google’s success
This is not the place to retrace the history and fortunes of Google.
However, there are some suggestive notes, especially on the beginnings of Google Inc. The first “location” was precisely the garage of my friend Susan Wojcicki, who will be one of the first hired by Google. And from 2014 she will take over the helm of YouTube.
The definitive leap in quality will take place with the transfer of the headquarters to Mountain View, in 2003. The following year Gmail will be launched, in 2006 it will be the turn of the increasingly acclaimed Google Maps, and in 2008 it will be up to Google Chrome.
Google today
Google, 25 years after the trademark was registered, is by far the most used search engine.
It is once again the language that shows how much the engine is part of everyone’s daily life, on a global level. The neologism “to google” has become synonymous, par excellence, with any search on the web.
The disputes (and the very recent record fine)
Tech giant, Google has been fined several times in recent years for violating user privacy.
Or for abuse of a dominant position. In this sense, In the past few hours, the news of the confirmation by the Court of the European Union of the decision taken by the European Commission has come.
Google will be fined for “imposing illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators in order to consolidate the dominance of its search engine”.
The fine, amounting to as much as € 4.125 billion, is the largest ever imposed in Europe by a competition supervisory authority. And to say the sanction originally envisaged was even more hefty: about 4.34 billion euros.
In short, the 25 years of Google would seem a bit bitter anniversary. But the company can always say that the official celebration falls on September 27, and today is just the Google.com registration date.