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
organization put the software for the web into the public domain making it free for anyone to use By 1995 there were already about ten million documents on the World Wide Web 5 Berners-Lee’s work set the stage for the modern information age NAVIGATING THE WEB Around this time Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford University in California They were working toward PhDs in computer science They came up with a new idea to help people find what they were looking for online Their system would analyze how popular websites were then use that information to help rank them in search results In the process the young men developed a new way of searching the web They called their search engine Google a deliberate misspelling of the word googol which is a number equal to one followed by 100 zeros The first version went live on the Stanford University website in 1997 It had a refreshingly clean look it was simple to use and it had no ads In 1998 Page and Brin decided to leave school to start their own company 10
GOOGLE GROWS The site’s popularity grew fast Google became a common term meaning to conduct a computer search 6 In 2006 it was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary For a long time people wondered how a search engine company could make money After all a good search engine sent users away from the search engine to the website they were looking for But Google stayed in business at first relying on investments When Google did eventually start to show advertisements they were separated from search results and they only appeared when they were related to the search terms The enormous volume of searches that happen every day means this advertising revenue adds up to billions of dollars per year STANFORD START-UPS In the 1980s and 1990s Stanford University was a good place for people to start a tech company The university had an Office of Technology Licensing It helped students get patents to protect their inventions Located in Silicon Valley the heart of the tech industry Stanford is surrounded by venture capitalists These people invest large amounts of money to help new companies Stanford also allowed its professors to keep a stake in any companies formed from projects they advised Many computer companies came from this environment In the 1980s came Sun Microsystems a company that developed computer hardware and software Its cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim gave Google its first 100,000 check 7 In the 1990s came Excite a search company founded by Stanford alumni and Yahoo an information directory and search company founded by two Stanford PhD candidates 11
