The first images barely show how much it has changed – Quartz

Where would we be without Google during stormy debates, gaps in memory or when the mysteries of life plague us, like why the sky is blue? The solution for many of us in these moments is "just the Google". It's such an ubiquitous action that "google" is now in the dictionary.

The search engine celebrates its 20th anniversary today (September 27th). The date, arbitrary according to the company, commemorates the founding of Google in September 1998. The search engine was created in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as a research project, both of whom had studied at Stanford University. At the time, he called Backrub because the system analyzed the "back links" on the Web to understand the importance of each web page and lived on a university server. . In 1998, the project attracted the attention of Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems, who invested $ 100,000 in it. Google incorporated September 4, 1998.

In the first screenshot of Google.com captured by Internet Archive, as of November 11, 1998, the site is not completely different from the one we are currently experiencing. It was still a prototype at the time, but the Spartan home page featured a primary color logo, a search box, and a "I feel lucky" button, as it is today.

Although it is not captured in this screenshot, the Google Doodle, special designs of the company logo used to honor certain events, was already there. The first was used on August 30, 1998, a few days before the incorporation of the company, when Brin and Page designed a doodle for the Burning Man festival as a message out of the office.

But under the hood, there have been massive changes since the early days. The search engine outperformed competitors such as Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), Yahoo and AltaVista, thanks in part to its proprietary page ranking system, PageRank. He mapped links to web pages and used them as a measure of quality. Web pages that were cited more frequently and frequently on the Web appeared more in the search results.

In November 1998, Google indexed about 25 million web pages. Today, Google indicates that its search index contains "hundreds of billions" of web pages.

Google's indexing algorithms, which change all the time, go well beyond PageRank. The search engine uses over 200 signals or ranking factors to answer search queries. Algorithms analyze billions of Google searches a day to understand what we are really looking for when asking a question. And Google customizes search results for each user, taking into account things like where they are, what they've searched for and clicked on, and what device they're using.

The algorithms that ranked the pages and the search results delivered followed the rules encoded by humans. Today, they are mainly managed by artificial intelligence. In 2015, Google implemented a deep learning system called RankBrain, which generates the many research results we are currently seeing.

The search results pages have also been improved. In 1998, the results were displayed in a list of text and links. Today, the results pages include sponsored search results and other advertisements, its source of money, as well as images, news, videos, purchases, flights and other search results.

And Google has also experienced massive growth. It now has one of the most popular email applications on the planet, Gmail; tools like Google Maps and Google Drive are used by millions of people; Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world. he builds his own smartphones and other devices; it has a booming cloud business; and produces one of the world's most popular web browsers in Chrome. Its parent company, Alphabet, headed by Brin and Page, also works on autonomous cars, treating illnesses and distributing internet from balloons.

While its homepage remains humbly familiar, Google has gone from a $ 100,000 research project to a technology and advertising engine that generated $ 109 billion in revenue last year for Alphabet, a $ 825 billion business.