Google's early focus on simplicity and user experience drove its future successes

Google began as a Stanford University dorm room project

Launched in 1998, Google revolutionized search engines with its clean design and PageRank algorithm. As of 2025, Google has about 90% of the search market share but faces new challenges from AI-powered competitors and regulatory scrutiny.

A timeline of Google's growth

As of 2025, Google will approach its third decade of existence. A period that's seen the company go from dominating the search market to the launch of one billion-user product after another, from Gmail to YouTube. This detailed timeline lays out what happened when, laying out Google's history in detail. It marks key milestones, like the introduction of Google Maps, and what year they happened.

What we learned about Google

Google processes over 8.5 billion searches every day—more than the number of people on Earth. This short breakdown covers how the company evolved from a Stanford research project into a global tech leader, with products like YouTube, Gmail, and Android reaching billions worldwide.

Targeted ads accounted for 80% of Google's parent company's total revenue in 2020

Ads in Google Search, YouTube, and other products brought in $147B for Alphabet, with ad click costs ranging from $7 to several hundred dollars. YouTube's ad revenue alone jumped 49% year-over-year in one quarter.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, didn't believe in its ad model at first

He admits the company made many mistakes during its growth from 100 Google employees to nearly 200,000 in 2022. His biggest mistake as CEO involved social media, which was not executed well with the Google+ platform.

7 angel investors funded Google in its early days

Entrepreneur Shaan Puri shares how seven strangers acted as Google’s earliest angel investors. The first gave Google $100K without even putting his equity agreement in writing. The investors on “Shark Tank” use their personal funds to support startups, but they’re often more predatory about terms than typical angels.

YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65B in stock during its second year

In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B, only two years after its launch. Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture firms, was an early investor in the streaming video platform, seeing it as the next step in the evolution of user-generated content that flourished online during the mid-2000s.

View a list of companies owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet

These companies include Google subsidiaries like YouTube, the biggest online video sharing and streaming platform, Nest, which manufactures smart products like speakers and thermostats, and Waymo, the technology company developing self-driving cars.

Google had a quirky, auction-based IPO

In its sixth year, Google's shareholders reached a size where regulators would require the company to publicly report its financials. This prompted the company to go public through an unconventional style: the Dutch auction. The company auctioned its shares starting from a high price and dropping to a lower level.

Generative AI is reinventing Internet search

Data privacy advocates worry that Google collects too much personal information

Politicians have also criticized whether the search engine exerts too much control over gatekeeping online information and influencing what is considered fact or fiction, deviating from its original corporate motto of "don't be evil."

How Google Street View generates profit

Google Maps, one of the most trusted navigation applications today, has a somewhat mysterious way of making a profit. YouTuber Phil Edwards uncovers the secret economic practices of Google Street View, while also offering a deeper understanding of how it works.

Google only sorts and searches a fraction of the overall internet

The "surface web," consisting of billions of public webpages, excludes nonindexed digital content, such as corporate intranets and email inboxes. A deeper layer, called the dark web, is also hidden and requires special software to access.

Slick interfaces and bundling helped solidify Excel as the corporate planning tool

First initiated in the 1980s, the Excel spreadsheet built off predecessors like Lotus and VisiCalc, leveraging a novel graphic interface to entice new customers and packaging the program with other Microsoft Office products. Forty years later, the tool faces challenges from Google and AI, but retains devoted users.

Mark Zuckerberg credits some of Facebook's success to constant evolution

Before becoming the head of OpenAI, Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator—a startup accelerator company that supported companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Coinbase. In 2016, Altman interviewed Zuckerberg about creating Facebook and its growth over time. Zuckerberg said that, unlike other companies (think: CourseMatch), Facebook kept growing and adding new features, which prevented the app from becoming obsolete.

Google Search includes over 50 Easter eggs hidden behind specific search terms

Some queries—besides providing search results—trigger additional effects on the site, including tilting the page after searching for "askew," having the page perform dance moves to the song after searching for "[cha-cha slide]," and the ability to play a version of block breaker after searching for "Atari breakout."

Many original dot-com company founders were bought out early on

The people who bought the original domains for dot-com companies and had the ideas to start businesses were often bought out by investors before becoming well-known companies. Both Pets.com and Broadcast.com were acquired early on.

Sears once tried to become a tech company

In 1984, Sears arguably created one of the first online retail services, called “Prodigy,” in 1984 alongside IBM and CBS. But it was more of a WeChat than an Amazon, offering a variety of other services to users a few years before the dot com era.

These famous brands used to have different names

Did you know that Nike used to be called Blue Ribbon Sports? Or that Google was originally named BackRub? Getting a brand's name right is a tough job; there's an entire cottage industry of brand naming agencies to prove it. See which brands got it right the first time—and which ones might be better off with their current names—in this article.

Lessons learned from Steve Jobs

From predicting our screen-filled future in 1983 to slashing Apple's product line in 1997, Steve Jobs believed in focus, simplicity, and the fusion of technology and art. His philosophies still influence how products are built and marketed today.

Understanding TikTok-owner ByteDance's business model

ByteDance has ridden TikTok's major success to become the world's most valuable startup. This deep dive showcases some of the company's smartest moves and tactics, and where it's headed next.

Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model

Central to any understanding of the multifaceted nature of Amazon's business today is the concept of the "flywheel" at the heart of the company. Put simply, it's an idea that refers to a self-reinforcing cycle that drives the continuous growth of Amazon's various businesses, including its retail arm, its Prime subscription service, and more.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Reimagining YouTube as cable TV, complete with channel-surfing

The site streams YouTube content as if it were broadcast television, providing the ability to flip through channels and enter videos mid-stream, and you also can't easily skip ahead. The product is designed in part to bring back serendipity to video discovery.

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham keeps a public archive of his insightful essays

In addition to cofounding Y Combinator and other companies before it, Paul Graham is a prolific writer and artist. He chronicled many of his thoughts while building Y Combinator in a series of dozens of candid essays, all of which you can read in an online archive.

A quick guide to everything SpaceX

SpaceX has single-handedly reignited commercial space exploration, with its reusable rockets, broadband satellite constellation, and plans to populate Mars. The company has gone from a mere idea in 2002 to the world's most well-known private space company. Learn the basics about this pivotal company with this quick guide from CNET.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

In its famous catalog, Sears sold $600 DIY house kits from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in an estimated 100,000 'Sears and Roebuck homes.'

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Telehealth demand for GLP-1s for weight loss is booming as consumers seek easier access.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.