KimCrawley.com- Bright Ideas: A Brief History of the Web- Part seven...

To my dear readers, I apologize for the delay of part seven. The one downside of my recent popularity on the blogging scene, and having to write articles for a number of major commercial websites, now including eHow.com, is that my time is a more precious commodity.

I will not give up on this blog, and the maximum time between posts here should be about two days.

My 'A Brief History of the Web' series is among my most popular work, and I aim to please!

Make sure you read any parts you may have missed, first:

So, there have been some major successes on the web, and the one I'm focusing on in this post is still a huge player, if not the HUGEST player, today.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were PhD students at Stanford University. They first met in 1995. The following year, they created a search engine called BackRub, for the use of Stanford students and faculty.


1996 BackRub screenshot, courtesy of blogoscoped.com

BackRub- at old URL http://backrub.stanford.edu, don't try it now, you'll get a 404, became very popular on Stanford's campus. It soon grew to a point that Stanford decided their bandwidth couldn't handle it anymore.

Now, if Stanford were clairvoyant, they would have invested money into giving BackRub more bandwidth somewhere else, but they didn't. Obviously, that was but a minor hurdle for Page and Brin.

The very first screenshot of Google, from 1997. This page was still hosted at backrub.stanford.edu.

So, they started Google, in 1997, technically speaking. 'Google' is a play on the word googol, which in mathematical terms, means 1 plus 100 zeros, a number I won't bother to type out here. The name was intended to represent the nearly infinite number of web pages that can be found by Google.

From 1998, finally using the google.com domain. This is the very first appearance of Google's colourful logo. Soon afterward, the font was changed slightly, and the exclamation mark was dropped. No more pretending to be like Yahoo!

Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Page and Brin a cheque for $100,000. I'm sure Andy doesn't regret it now. PC Magazine soon made Google their favourite search engine in their list of 100 Favorite Websites, toward the end of 1998.

Throughout the very end of the 1990s and the first few years of the 2000s, Google grew at a shocking pace.

By 2000, Google launched in a number of different European languages.

A quick evolution of the Google logo, courtesy of amitbhawani.com

As pretty much all of us know, Google is famous for doing fancy stuff to their logo on special occasions, or for special reasons. Here's the very first 'doodle' logo, for New Year's, 2000:

Then, they did Groundhog Day and Valentine's Day. Next up was St. Patrick's Day.

Below are some more interesting 'doodles', done in the year 2000:

Summer Olympics 2000, in Sydney

Hey, here's Halloween 2000, and today is Halloween 2010!

Yes, the skating penguins are a culture neutral 'Happy Holidays' graphic, but is this really a nod to us Linux freaks?

In recent years, Google's 'doodles' have caught on so much that they've had the permission of the owners of major intellectual property to use their entertainment properties.

And recently, they've gotten REALLY creative. Here are some Google 'doodles' that are really abstract:

To commemorate Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille, a way for the blind to read by touch.

A barcode, pure and simple.

Celebrating Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code.

And some more very interesting 'doodles':

Tetris! There was a time that my father couldn't get enough of the game...

UNIX date: 1234567890

Tetsuwan Atomu, otherwise known as Astro Boy, for us Osamu Tezuka loving otaku...

A jazz fan like myself must tip my hat to Dizzy Gillespie!

Commemorating the 'gogol', how apropos...

Getting warm and fuzzy with Norman Rockwell

How many decibel places have we determined of pi, yet?

A Doodle4Google competition winner from 2008, Germany's Mai Dao Ngoc

In honour of Eric Carle

September 9th, 2009's 09/09/09 09:09:09

Her Majesty the Queen visits Google's HQ

And Google has even done some pretty cool interactive stuff, with video and Adobe Flash.

This video logo celebrated John Lennon's recent 70th birthday. See Remembering John Lennon: An Objective View for my thoughts on the man.

This logo is playable!

The above is a .png graphic, but you may play the Google Pacman Doodle here: google.com/pacman

And finally, for my 'doodle gallery', anyway, here's today's 'doodle', using Scooby Doo to celebrate Halloween 2010:

It's done in Flash, and each 'paw' brings you to another frame in the picture story.

Anyway, enough of that for now!

We all know that Google has expended far beyond web search. I use a number of different Google services, such as THIS blogging format and host, Blogger.com. Most blogs hosted here are yourblogname.blogspot.com. Google bought Blogger by buying Pyra Labs in February 2003. When I create the RSS feed for this blog, I use Google's acquired Feedburner.com. Please subscribe to it here, you'll be in good company! http://feeds.feedburner.com/kimcrawleycom-BrightIdeas Google's biggest moneymaker is AdWords/AdSense, and I make a little bit of money by running ads on this blog, as well as a share of the revenue from Google ads on my articles at Blogcritics and Dragon Blogger. According to my legal agreement, I may not click on my own ads- I wouldn't even consider it. I'm not even allowed to say, "please click on my ads!" I also use AdSense to promote my web design services at KimCrawley.com. Soon, my domain will lead to an index page promoting my OVERALL online content freelancing services, including web design, graphic design, and article writing/journalism/blogging. My web design website will simply be hosted there, right now my domain and index.html simply leads to my web design site.

Google offers a plethora of other services, and even has excellent browsers, closed source Chrome and open source Chronium. Google's Android OS is used on more and more smartphones, it's still a much better smartphone OS than what Apple uses for their iPhone. But, Apple sucks overall, anyway, see Why I'll never spend a dime on Apple... Microsoft has done poorly in the area of smartphone OSes, and hence all of the recent promotion of Windows 7 Mobile. At least they're not Palm. And I can't forget my home province hero, RIM, the creator of the BlackBerry.

Anyway, I digress. If things keep going at this pace, my ass will be tattooed with 'property of Google'. I'm not a Google 'fanboy', (I'm more of a FOSS/Linux 'fangirl', if you can't tell) but I'm certainly in awe of their success, I'm even using their services AS I TYPE. Will Google ever become a corporate disaster story? Or will they be 'blue chip' for decades or even centuries? Only time will tell.

I will do my best to publish parts eight and nine while I'm in the pharmaceutical lab from 5:00pm tomorrow to the morning of Thursday the 4th. Obviously, I plan to post the first part of Diary of a Lab Rat tomorrow, too, writing about my experiences.

Friday, I'll be attending my very first 2600 meeting. I will also be bringing my Ubuntu netbook there. I expect to be the least knowledgeable person there, by far. I study IT, and I'm learning programming, but I'm REALLY green. So, I hope to make some new friends who can teach me stuff, even indirectly. I certainly have a lot of respect for the hacking community. I may be blogging about those meetings, too, but only publishing stuff that isn't confidential. (Hackers are NOT criminals, crackers are. But even at some Oprah book club meeting, some matters may be confidential.)

When I have time, I'll change the colour scheme of this blog for better readability. It'll be a time consuming process, and I'm stubborn about it. I love black and fushia so damn much!

I'm very busy with Blogcritics, Dragon Blogger, and Demand Media/eHow.com as well. You'll be reading lots more of me, folks!