Let's Google it! The Google search engine has recently turned 25

According to Interbrand, the Google brand is valued at more than $260 billion and ranks 4th in the list of the best global brands in 2023.

The Google search engine started as a research project by PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. The two friends worked tirelessly to make the World Wide Web more accessible, useful and structured. The search engine was based on the PageRank algorithm and its underlying assumption that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. However, the project was a major distraction for the students from their studies, and in 1999 they wanted to sell it for $1 million, and were even prepared to reduce the stated amount, but no one was interested in the offer. Then they put their graduate studies on hold and got down to the business side of their project.

The name Google was registered as a misspelling of the number googol, which in the decimal system refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros and symbolizes large quanitites of information that the search engine can process. This emphasizes that Google's mission is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." (https://about.google/).

To commemorate holidays and significant events, the search engine's homepage features Doodles – pictures, animations and games. The first Doodle, the Burning Man, appeared on August 30, 1998. The very first Doodle was launched as a simple ‘out-of-office’ message. To date, more than 5,000 doodles have been created. And the search engine's 25th birthday Doodle shows how the Google logo has changed over time: https://www.google.com/doodles/googles-25th-birthday.

Millions of people use google.com every day. The search engine has become such an indispensable part of our lives that the word "google" has even officially entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Today, the company has many products and employs more than 60,000 people, but the mission to make the world and the Internet a better place has remained the same.