Google's 20th birthday: The search engine that has become integral part of our lives

Google Maps are widely used by almost everyone in the urban areas for navigation.

New Delhi, Sep 27: Google completes 20 years today and the search engine giant has put out a short video as part of Google Doodle to showcase its journey over the last two decades. At the time when Google was launched, there were a few other search engines in the web world with Yahoo being the most popular one.

Google evolved over the years, the algorithms changed and search results became more and more accurate. Google indexes billions of web pages to allow users to search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock.

How Google is different from conventional search engines?

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, Larry Page and Sergey Bri theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

The exact methodology of how Google gives preference to one page compared to other is still not clearly knowm. The main reason is that the algorithms keep changing with the aim to provide most accurate search results.

Other services offered by Google:

The company's rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Google's core search engine (Google Search). It offers services designed for work and productivity (Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides), email (Gmail/Inbox), scheduling and time management (Google Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant messaging and video chat (Google Allo, Duo, Hangouts), language translation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google Earth, Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google Keep), and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos).

Impact on lives:

Such are the times now that almost everyone has a gmail id. People widely use Google's mail services and cloud storage Google Drive. Even the smart phones, the Android ones, are integrated with Google and we can access photos taken on phone from anywhere as snaps get stored in Google Drive.

Google Maps are widely used by almost everyone in the urban areas for navigation. When searching for an address, asking 10 people for guidance has become a thing of the past. It even includes traffic information which allows users to plan their routes in advance.

Google has brought about a massive change in the way lead lives. Over the last two decades it really ahs had a significant impact on out lives.