Inspired by the British Museum’s “Stuff That Defines Us: A History of the World in 100 Objects,” Padua360 shares with readers the origins of certain objects and how they play a role in life today.
In 1996, two college students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Stanford University, created a search engine called “Backrub.” “Backrub” operated on Stanford servers for about a year but quickly began taking up too much bandwidth for the university. Larry and Sergey changed the name, and coined the now famous “Google.” Google is a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. This allusion to the mathematical term represented their desire to create a search engine with an infinite amount of information. They set up their first office in a garage with a few other members. The company, Google, quickly outgrew their garage office and acquired new headquarter buildings. The company rapidly expanded, adding several new languages and features.
By June of 2000, Google had become the world’s largest search engine. Before Google, researching meant going to the library and searching for books. Today, we are able to find thousands of results within a few seconds. Google has entirely revolutionized the way we gather information. It has made researching a fast paced process without the use of the conventional book searching and manually flipping pages. Instead, we are able to use search engines like Google to gather the resources necessary to complete assignments with just one click of a button.