Ten years of Google

Last Modified: 02 Oct 2008
By: Channel 4 News

Google is 10 years old. Here we look back at the history of a company whose name features in the Oxford English Dictionary.

January 1996

Google started life as a research project by Stanford PhD student Larry Page. The work involved looking at the mathematical properties of the web, and its link structure. He was soon joined by fellow student Sergey Brin.

September 1998

The pair formally incorporated their company, Google Inc, at a friends garage in California. This followed research in which it became apparent that their method of searching the internet was more effective than existing techniques.

December 1998

Google had already amassed an index of 60m pages. Industry experts were saying it was a more effective search engine than rivals Excite.com, Hotbot or Yahoo.

March 1999

The firm moved to offices in Palo Alto, home to several successful Silicon Valley firms. Later in the year it moved to even bigger offices in the same area as business grew.

May 2000

Google launches in ten other languages: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. In September; Chinese, Japanese and Korean are added too.

July 2001

The firm launches an image search facility, with 250m available.

December 2001

Number of pages indexed to Google had grown to 3bn.

May 2002

Signs a partnership deal with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.

March 2004

Google moves to "Googleplex" at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, giving more than 800 employees a campus environment. By the end of the year the number of indexed web pages reaches 8bn.

April 2005

It launches a new Google maps service - pioneered for first use in the UK.

October 2006

Google bought popular online video site YouTube for $1.65bn.The YouTube brand continues to exist, and does not merge with Google Video.

January 2007

Announce a partnership with China Mobile, the world's largest mobile telecom carrier, to provide mobile and Internet search services in China.

September 2008

Google celebrates its tenth birthday. Estimates on the firms' value range from $25bn to $150bn.