Google = 10

It's the 7th of September, and the big G is now 10 years old. Hard to believe that back in 1998, the internet king didn't even exist, and finding stuff online wasn't really that simple. Sure, Yahoo was around, plus a number of other weirdly named search engines (Lycos, Altavista) that have since died out, but none have really done what this behemoth has managed to do.

Google's business-model managed to quickly grow the company from an above-average search engine, into a global corporation with a market-cap of $142 billion, generating over $16 billion in annual revenues. They've managed to buy numerous innovative start-ups (everything from YouTube, to Picasa, to the core engine of their Google Earth service), created their own widespread services like Gmail & Orkut, and are pushing the barrier with cloud-computing, their new internet browser (Chrome) and the soon to be released Google cellphone. Yup, they sure do seem to have everything.

Now for Google's humble beginning: two university students started up Google in a friend's garage, and in a few short months, boom! The idea was actually envisioned back in 1996 though, which is a little annoying because that was when I created my first website. Sadly enough, theirs has managed to make them billionaires, mine has not. (If you really want to take a look at my website, which I don't advise, you can check it out here. Good for a laugh).

Anyway, we have Google to thank for quite a bit of the innovation/streamlining of the internet, because honestly, back then it was a bit of a crappy place. Take a look at Google's original page, for example:

Yeah... That's pretty crappy looking alright, but that's actually pretty simple and innovative in comparison to whatever else was out there on the internet. Let's take a look at a global corporation like McDonalds, for example. They must have had something that looked good back then, no?


Err... No... And dammit, my eyes hurt!!! But if you think that's bad, you need to actually browse their site; check out the funny animated dude and the cheesy comments, the crappy drawings, and the supposedly different adult/kid links that both lead to the same place (click on the Mcdonalds page to go there).

It didn't stop there, here are just a few other websites that looked amazing back in the pre-Google days:

MSN (Yup, Microsoft!)

Lego, lovely.

Either way, let's just be glad that the internet isn't what it used to be back then, and thank you Google for being part of what makes it what it is today.

Congratulations to Google on your 10th.

(Written on Blogger, a Google service. Bloody hell, they do own everything, don't they!?)