work to make self-driving cars widely available Google engineers work with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA to help discover new planets One of the company’s projects is to build a system of huge balloons to give internet access to the whole world People around the world run an average of more than 40,000 internet searches on Google com every second That’s more than three billion searches every day 2 Each one of those people is looking for some specific information and Google’s technology scours the internet to find the answers users are seeking Of all the online search traffic in the world in 2017 more than 80 percent of it was through Google 3 Users can search for and within scholarly articles and books news items videos or across the entire World Wide Web at once Google now officially a part of the parent company Alphabet Inc is one of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies It provides billions of people with software services and free access to the world’s collected knowledge It may be surprising then to learn that Google began as a student project in the mid-1990s at Stanford University How did Google become the tech titan it is today 6
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 GOOGLE SEARCHES 1998 2016 BILLIONS 4 3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 THE INTERNET AND THE WEB The idea of the internet developed in the mid-1900s At the time computers were huge expensive and complex Only laboratories certain government agencies and a few universities had them Researchers in these places wanted to find a way for their computers to communicate with each other They created a closed network using telephone lines and created software protocols to transfer data between computers 7
Then during the 1970s and 1980s computers became smaller less expensive and easier to use More and more MORE THAN A SEARCH ENGINE Today almost every part of a person’s digital life can be lived through Google services or on Google devices Chat programs such as Allo and Hangouts use text and video Google Maps provides navigation directions and traffic information Google Books is a digital library bigger than any physical library in existence Documents are created saved and shared through Google Docs and Google Drive Millions of users browse the web with Google Chrome Papers are submitted and graded through Google Classroom Classes can take virtual reality field trips through Expeditions And in its Google Play Store the company sells games music television shows and movies people began to use them In just a few years the internet spread to more universities and businesses and eventually to the general public Even so the internet required technical expertise to access and it didn’t look anything like it does today English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee realized the internet needed to be easier for more people to use In 1989 he proposed the World Wide Web a network of linked pages and files that could be accessed using the internet He created a new standardized protocol to let computers talk to each other the hypertext transfer protocol HTTP He also created hypertext markup language HTML a standardized format in which pages on the World 8
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN in its French acronym Wide Web could be written Using HTML would mean that pages would display in the same way for all users regardless of what kind of computer they were using The first website went live in 1991 Central to the World Wide Web were hyperlinks pieces of text on a website that could be clicked to take the user to a different related page Hyperlinks soon connected vast numbers of documents on the web In 1993 Berners-Lee’s research 9
