Events in Google History: 20 Significant Moments at 20 Years as a Company

Here are 20 major events in Google history as the Search Engine giant clocked 20 recently.

1998

Larry Page and Sergey Brin start to show investors their novel search engine, initially called  BackRub, which ranks search results based on links back to individual pages, rather than keywords.

Google got interest from 4 angel investors namely: Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems co founder), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com founder), Ram Shriram (former Amazon executive) and David Cheriton (Stanford professor).

1999

Page and Brin try, unsuccessfully, to sell Google to the now-defunct Excite. Later in the year, Google raises $25 million from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and others.

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2000

Google launches its first April Fool’s Day prank, called MentalPlex. MetalPlex asked people to project a mental image of what they want to search for while staring at an animated GIF.

2001

Google makes its first acquisition in its corporate history, buying Deja, which forms the basis of Google Groups.

2002

Google officially enters pop culture vernacular, as with a character of the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” making a reference to ‘Googling’ someone.  Yahoo offers to buy Google for $3 billion, but Google declines.

2003

Google moves into 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, leasing buildings from the Silicon Graphics. 1600 Amphitheater Parkway would become the nexus for the Googleplex, which now spans hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space in Mountain View.

2004

Google goes public in August 2004 at $85 per share, raising a little over $1.9 billion.

2005

Google Maps and Google Earth were launched, undercutting the paid GPS navigation market.

2006

Google buys YouTube for $1.6 billion. Despite the hefty price tag, YouTube remains one of Google’s most profitable acquisitions to date, generating billions of dollars per year in video advertising revenue.

2007

Google buys advertising service DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

2008

Google begins distributing early versions of the Android operating system to phone manufacturers. T-Mobile’s G1 is the first smartphone to run Android.

2009

Google crosses a major milestone, with people making more than 1 billion search queries on the site per day. The site becomes the dominant search engine in the U.S., with 65% market share.

2010

Google launches its first branded smartphone, the Nexus One.

2011

Google buys Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Three years later, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion.

2012

Google reports annual revenue of more than $50 billion.

2013

Google launches Chromecast, a dongle that allows people to stream content from their phones or computers to a TV.

2014

Google buys DeepMind, a U.K.-based artificial intelligence company, for $625 million. It also picks up home automation startup Nest for $3.2 billion.

2015

Google restructures itself as Alphabet, a holding company that owns several companies, including Google.

2016

Google launches its line of smart home speakers, powered by Google Assistant.

2017

European regulators hit Google with a $2.7 billion fine, for promoting its own shopping results over results from competing shopping services.

2018

Internal protests prompt Google to cancel its involvement in Project Maven, a government effort to use artificial intelligence to automatically process military drone footage.

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