Welcome to another edition of Learn with Lucid! In our September instalment, the team are looking at the history of one of the most well-known tech companies in the world.
Did you know that Lucid actually predates Google by 9 years? We have been providing the highest quality IT support and services for decades — today, we invite you to look back with us on the history of the world’s most visited website.
1995 — Larry Page meets Sergey Brin at Stanford University. By the following year, the two men had built a search engine that used links to rank the importance of web pages, which they called Backrub.
1997 — Backrub is renamed Google. The name is a play on the word “googol”, a mathematical term that denotes a 1 followed by 100 zeroes: representing the vast amount of information that the search engine could work with.
1998 — Google Inc. is officially created on September 4th, 1998, when Page and Brin register the google.com domain.
1999 — One of Google’s software engineers, Urs Hölzle, starts bringing his beloved dog Yoshka to work with him. The gigantic Leonberger is given the title of Google’s Top Dog. (To this day, Google employees are encouraged to bring their dogs to work in honour of Yoshka, and the company is proudly and enthusiastically dog-friendly!)
2004 — Google launches Gmail. Today, it has over 1.8 billion active users — that is almost a quarter of the global population.
2005 — Google launches Google Maps.
2006 — Google purchases YouTube for $1.65 billion. In one study in 2020, 98% of US adults reported that they used YouTube at least once a month — it was certainly a good investment.
2008 — Google launches Chrome. Initially, the then-CEO of Google disapproved of the idea, but Page and Brin intervened to make sure that Chrome got across the finish line. Today, it has over 60% of the browser market share (in fact, we did a lot of the research for this blog using Chrome).
2013 — Google purchases Waze for $966 million.
2021 — Google purchases Fitbit in a deal worth over $2 billion.
2025 —Google turns 27 years old — and Lucid Technology Solutions turns 36!
We may be older than Google, but the Lucid team always stays ahead of the latest technology and business solutions! We are very proud to provide excellent outsourced IT services for a wide variety of clients: for more information about working with us, you can contact us here.