Happy birthday Google!

Today Google celebrates its tenth birthday and, after it became the standard in research on the Internet, the giant of Mountainview tip in the future to become one of the biggest players in technology globally. From the humble beginnings in a garage in Menlo Park, California, the company has grown to become one of the most recognisable brands in the world, with an annual turnover of 17 billion dollars, profits amounting to 5 billion dollars and a pace of growth of 35 percent. Worldwide Google has about 19,000 full-time employees and the market capitalisation amounted to 150 billion dollars.

When September 7, 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford University, decided to establish their company, they had no more than four computers with the challenge of an investor who financed with 100,000 dollars, believing that their Internet search engine could change the world of computing. Ten years after, Google has become a giant that controls about 40% of online advertising and 70% of research in the world. In recent months Google has launched its suite of programs for businesses to compete with Microsoft Office, and just a few days ago it presented its first browser to surf the Web, developed to counter the leadership of Internet Explorer.

Page and Brin, who at 35 years of age are worth about 19 billion dollars each, have always defined the philosophy of Google with the motto: “Do not be evil”, but many fear that the giant hours may be less to its principles, being increasingly large and powerful. The growing expansion of Google’s control on information and Internet traffic have raised many concerns regarding privacy and competition. “You can not do the things they’re trying to do without having to deal with the clash with the government or with rivals,” said Danny Sullivan, journalist that has followed Google since its inception. Moreover, the attention of antitrust authorities on Google is growing. Google collected about 48 billion dollars in advertising over the Internet since 2001. It has not retained the money for itself, but it has paid 15 billion dollars in commissions to other sites that host its advertising space, thus helping the development of other major destinations of the virtual world, as Aol, Myspace or Ask.com.

“Google is the oxygen in this ecosystem,” said John Battelle, author of a book about the company.

Google aims to make some of its investments proficuous, as the company of online marketing services DoubleClick, acquired six months ago for about 3.2 billion dollar, or the video clips site YouTube, which should generate 200 million dollars this year but which analysts believe is only a fraction of its potential for growth.

The company chairman Eric Schmidt said that Google would get a yearly turnover amounted to 100 billion dollars a year, which would be of a size comparable to those of two major computer companies in the world: Hewlett-Packard and Ibm.

This year Google will exceed for the first time the threshold of 20 billion dollars. Schmidt, Brin and Page have close a deal to stay at the heart of the company until 2024. The importance of Google in the world of technology companies was emphasised in the first part of this year by desperate attempt by Microsoft to buy Yahoo and carve out a space in the field of online advertising. The colossus of Redmond came to offer 47.5 billion dollars to buy Yahoo, without success.

The idea that Microsoft would have spent so many resources to compete with Google would have been inconceivable in 1998, when two students from Stanford decided to convert their research project, entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextuale Web Search Engine” into a company. Brin and Page began to take an interest to search the Internet as early as 1996, considering that many important content were not found by search engines at the time. The companies behind them, Yahoo, Alta Vista and Excite – had shifted the attention from research and focused increasingly on building websites.

At that time, the Internet search was not considered a priority, but the two boys convinced Andy Bechtolstein, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, to fund them with an initial capital of 100,000 U.S. dollars.

The name Google is inspired by the concept of “googol, which in mathematics expresses a 1 followed by 100 zeros.