Now, the most popular search engine and well-known for other products such as Android, Google originated in 1998 by two Ph.D students from the Standford University in California named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. While Google wasn’t the first search engine to exist, it did become the most widely used fairly quickly after.
Google is known for many products, with some more popular than others. Some of the main products we thought we would look into the history of include Gmail, Android, Google Maps, YouTube, Blogger, AdWords, Analytics and AdSense.
Gmail:
Gmail is a free web-based email service which was developed purely by Google with its first release being on April 1, 2004. Gmail has now become more popular than Outlook.com (originally Hotmail) according to Wikipedia which states it has 1.4 billion users, while Outlook.com has 400 million users.
Android:
Everyone has heard about Android, but let’s give you a brief history. Android is an operating system established by Google mainly for touchscreen mobile devices and was originally based on Linux kernel. It was first developed by Android Inc and acquired by Google in 2005, then officially launched in September 2008. The HTC Dream was the first Android phone released. Since 2008, Android has come a long way with the current version up to 9 and various versions of Android released for Android TV and Wear OS for watches.
Google Maps:
Google Maps was acquired in October 2004 by Google and officially launched in February 2005. In September 2008, Google Maps for Android and iOS was released and in August 2013, Maps was announced to be the most popular app for smartphones.
YouTube:
Acquired in November 2006 was YouTube for about $1.65 billion. In August 2007, Google started introduced video advertising to YouTube, which created some controversy amongst frequent users of YouTube. In 2015, YouTube Red came out to provide ad-free access to all YouTube videos for a paid subscription.
Blogger:
For those who love blogging, Blogger would be the most popular blogging platform around. It gives users the ability to customize the look and feel of their blogs and their own personal blogspot.com address. Blogger was launched by a company called Pyra Labs and was obtained by Google in February 2003. It’s said that in 2013, Google confirmed there were 540 million active users using Blogger.
AdWords:
As Google was so successful over the years as a search engine, it launched Google AdWords (a paid form of marketing) in October 2000, to allow businesses to advertise specifically to particular locations, at particular times of day by setting costs per click and daily budgets.
Analytics:
With all the advertising that seemed to be a successful business model for Google, Google Analytics was launched in November 2005 as a free service that gives a tracking code upon signup which is placed behind your website to track and gather data from your website visitors.
AdSense:
In March 2003, Google AdSense was released. AdSense is a service that gives website owners the ability to choose certain ads to display on their website to earn money from the advertisers in order to generate revenue on a per-click or per-impression basis.
