March-December 1995
Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet at a spring gathering of new Stanford University Ph.D. computer science candidates. By year's end, they collaborate to develop technology that will become the foundation for the Google search engine.

January 1996-December 1997
Sergey and Larry create BackRub, the precursor to the Google search engine.

January-July 1998
Larry and Sergey continue to perfect Google's search technology. Larry's Stanford dorm room becomes Google's data center while Sergey's room serves as the business office. They start their own company with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder and fellow Stanford alum David Filo.

August-December 1998
Sergey and Larry, putting their studies on hold, raise $1 million in funding from family, friends, and angel investors to start Google. On September 7, 1998 Google is incorporated and moves to its first office in a friend's Menlo Park, Calif. garage with four employees. Google answers 10,000 search queries per day. PC Magazine includes Google, which is still in beta, in the list of Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998.

January-April 2000
Google introduces the first comprehensive wireless search technology for WAP phones and handheld devices, and launches a full suite of automated, highly customizable Google WebSearch services. Google also incorporates Netscape's Open Directory Project, which expands and augments Google's web search results with hand-selected directory listings. Yahoo! Internet Life magazine names Google the Best Search Engine on the Internet; Smart Computing magazine names Google to its 50 Hot Technologies list.

May-June 2000
Google launches search capabilities in 10 non-English language versions, and wins the prestigious Webby awards for Best Technical Achievement for 2000 and People's Voice Award in the Technical Achievement category for 2000.

Google becomes the largest search engine on the web, with a new index comprising 1 billion URLs. Yahoo! selects Google as its default search results provider to complement Yahoo!'s web directory and navigational guide. Google answers 18 million search queries per day.

August-October 2000
Google signs agreements with leading portals and websites in the United States, Europe and Asia; launches advertising programs to complement its growing search services business; and introduces a number of expanded search features including Google Number Search™ (GNS) which makes wireless data entry easy and faster on WAP phones. Forbes includes Google in its Best of the Web round-up, PC World calls Google the Best Bet Search Engine; and Google is awarded WIRED Readers Raves for Most Intelligent Agent on the Internet.

November-December 2000
Google answers more than 60 million searches per day. The Google index comprises more than 1.3 billion web pages. Google launches the Google Toolbar™, a downloadable browser plug-in that increases users' ability to find information from any web page anywhere on the web. PC Magazine UK honors Google with Best Internet Innovation award.

January-February 2001
Google answers more than 100 million searches per day. Google acquires Deja.com's Usenet archive dating back to 1995. Google releases new wireless search technology specifically designed for i-mode mobile phones in Japan. Vizzavi's European multi-access portal chooses Google for its search engine. Google also launches Google PhoneBook, which provides publicly available phone numbers and addresses search results.

March-April 2001
Dr. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Novell and a former CTO at Sun Microsystems, joins Google as chairman of the board of directors. Google powers search services at Yahoo! Japan, Fujitsu NIFTY and NEC BIGLOBE, the top three portals in Japan, as well as corporate sites Procter & Gamble, IDG.net (comprising 300 sites), Vodaphone, and MarthaStewart.com.

May-June 2001
Handspring integrates Google's search technology into its Blazer web browser, available for any Palm-based handheld computer. Google powers 130 portal and destination sites in 30 countries. Google adds Yahoo!, Procter & Gamble, IDG.net (comprising more than 300 sites), Vodafone, MarthaStewart.com, Sprint and Handspring to its growing list of search services customers. Google's advertising programs attract more than 350 Premium Sponsorship advertisers and thousands of AdWords advertisers, and delivers clickthrough rates four to five times higher than clickthrough rates for traditional banner ads.

Google offers country domains in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, and Korea. Users can select Google's interface in nearly 40 non-English languages. Users can also restrict their searches to pages written in any one of 26 languages supported by Google's language search capability. Google's automatic translation feature translates pages found in the search results into a user's preferred language.

July-August 2001
Dr. Eric Schmidt is appointed new Google CEO while co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin become president, products and president, technology respectively. Google wins another Webby, this time in the new Best Practices category. Google brings search to Cingular Wireless users and to more than 300 of Sony's corporate websites. New Google Image Search index launches with 250 million images and date range search becomes available through the Google advanced search page. Search patterns, trends and surprises are published in the Google Zeitgeist. Google partners with Logitech to provide iTouch™-enabled mice and keyboard users instant access to the Google search engine.

September-October 2001
Google purchases the technology assets of Outride, Inc. Universo Online (UOL) partners with Google to provide millions of UOL users throughout Brazil and Latin America immediate access to the Google search engine. The new tabbed home page interface goes live on Google.com and 25 international sites. With the addition of Arabic and Turkish, Google users can now limit their searches to web pages written in 28 languages. The Google Toolbar launches versions in five new languages. Google provides search to Lycos Korea users. Google partners with AT&T Wireless to provide AT&T Digital PocketNet® customers access to the world's largest search engine. Google expands partnership with NEC to provide site search for NEC's corporate website. Google launches file type search and expands its search into more than a dozen formats.

November-December 2001
Google increases the size and scope of searchable information available through the Google Search Engine to 3 billion web documents. Included in the 3 billion web documents is an archive of Usenet messages dating back to 1981. Google offers users an overview of the day's news with Google News Headlines. With the addition of an advanced search page and a larger collection of images, Google Image Search comes out of beta. Google launches a beta test of Google Catalog Search and enables users to search and browse more than 1,100 mail-order catalogs. Google continues global expansion with new sales offices in Hamburg, Germany and Tokyo, Japan. Google publishes a unique retrospective on 2001 search patterns and trends with the Year-End Google Zeitgeist.

January-February 2002
Google announces the availability of the Google Search Appliance, an integrated hardware/software solution that extends the power of Google to corporate intranets and web servers. To commemorate its third year of delivering the best search experience on the web, Google initiates its first annual Programming Contest. Earthlink launches a redesigned search function powered by the Google search engine. Google launches AdWords Select™, an updated version of the AdWords self-service advertising system with a number of new enhancements, including cost-per-click (CPC)-based pricing.

Google is honored with "Outstanding Search Service", "Best Image Search Engine", "Best Design", "Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine", and "Best Search Feature" (Google Toolbar and Google Cache) in the 2001 Search Engine Watch Awards. Google continues the expansion of its global capabilities by launching interface translations for Belarusian, Javanese, Occitan, Thai, Urdu, Klingon, Bihari, and Gujarati, bringing the total number of interface language options to 74. Google also increases the number of languages restricts to 35 with the additions of Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Indonesian, Serbian, Slovak, and Slovenian.

March-April 2002
Google enhances its search service with several new features designed to enrich search and navigation on the World Wide Web. A beta version of Google News is launched which presents continuously updated information culled from many of the world's news sources. The company offers Google Compute, a new Google Toolbar feature that accesses idle cycles on Google users' computers for working on complex scientific problems. The first beneficiary of this effort is Folding@home, a non-profit research project at Stanford University that is trying to understand the structure of proteins so they can develop better treatments for a number of illnesses.

Google reaches out to the software developer community with the Google Web APIs service, which enables programmers and researchers to develop software that accesses billions of web documents as a resource in their applications. PigeonRank, an April's Fools play on our own patented PageRank technology, is revealed on the Google home page. Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are named to InfoWorld's list of "Top Ten Technology Innovators" and Google wins an M.I.T Sloan eBusiness award as the "Student's Choice."

May-June 2002
Google and AOL announce a search services and syndicated advertising agreement to provide results to AOL's 34 million members and millions of visitors to AOL.com. Google launches Google Labs (http://labs.google.com), where users can play with Google's latest search technologies while they're still in the early stages of development. Google also reveals several new enhancements to its popular Google Toolbar software, including an Experimental Features page (linked from the bottom of the Google Toolbar options page) that offers the latest search tools developed by the Google Toolbar team. Seven new Google Toolbar interface languages are introduced, including traditional and simplified Chinese, Catalan, Polish, Swedish, Russian, and Romanian. With the addition of these languages, the Google Toolbar is now available in 20 interface languages.

Google continues its international expansion, opening an office in Paris to complement its existing international offices in London, Toronto, Hamburg and Tokyo. Google announces the winner of the 2002 Google Programming Contest, its first. The $10,000 prize goes to Daniel Egnor of New York, who created a geographic search program that enables users to search for web pages within a specified geographic area.

July - August
Google and Ask Jeeves announce a syndicated advertising agreement to provide Google ads on Ask.com properties. An agreement is signed with InfoSpace.com to provide Google advertising and search results on InfoSpace.com and its properties including Dogpile, MetaCrawler, WebCrawler, and Excite, among others. And a syndicated advertising and search services agreement is inked with AT&T for its AT&T WorldNet service. The Google Index increases in size to nearly 2.5 billion web pages. Google adds former Sun Microsystems executive George Reyes to its management team as Chief Financial Officer. Google hosts its first GoogleDance at the Googleplex, entertaining more than 500 attendees from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., with food, drink, music, and lively conversation.

September - October
Google takes its self-service advertising program to a global audience, launching the Google AdWords service in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan. Google announces the GB-5005, a midrange Google Search Appliance that complements the existing GB-1001 and GB-8008, launched in February, 2002. Google also introduces an updated beta version of its Google News product, bringing to market the first-ever news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google News crawls approximately 4,000 online news sources continuously throughout the day.

Google continues its international expansion, launching Bosnia and Sinhalese (Sri Lanka) language interfaces and its Google.ie Irish site, offering both English and Gaelic. Google makes available 16 new versions of the Google Toolbar, including Czech, Elmer Fudd, Farsi, Hebrew, Slovak, and Thai. Google receives the IDGNow! "Best Search Engine" Internet Award and the San Francisco Business Times' "Crowd Pleaser" HotTech Award. Google remembers to celebrate its fourth birthday with a special home page logo created by assistant webmaster Dennis Hwang.

November - December
Google introduces a beta version of Froogle, a product search engine that enables users to search for millions of products across the web. Google further expands by introducing sites in Australia, Finland, Greece, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Poland, and Thailand, bringing to 40 the number of its international domains. Google expands the size of its web index to more than 4 billion web documents. Yahoo! Japan joins Google's global advertising syndication network. Google releases its second annual Year-End Google Zeitgeist, highlighting search trends and patterns that mirror the key social and news events of 2002.

January - February
Google acquires Pyra Labs, creator of web self-publishing tool Blogger. International expansion continues, adding Google Paraguay and Google Puerto Rico domains to the list of available countries. Google releases two new Google Labs experiments – Google Viewer, which enables a surfer to view search results as a scrolling slide show, and Google WebQuotes, which incorporates quotes taken from other sites to provide third party commentary on search results. Google introduces its advertising programs in Italy and opens a sales office in Milan. Interbrand, an international branding consultancy, names Google the 2002 Brand of the Year. Wired magazine awards its 4th Annual Wired Rave "Business People of the Year" Award to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt.

March - April
Google surpasses 100,000 active advertisers in its Google AdWords program. Google announces its new content-targeted advertising program and the acquisition of Applied Semantics, to strengthen and enhance the program's underlying technology. Support for two new languages, Xhosa and Zulu, and 12 new international domains are added to bring the total available to 63 domains and 88 languages. New customers are announced including Amazon.com and Walt Disney Internet Group properties. Google Labs adds Google Compute, a toolbar feature that donates a computer's idle time to scientific research. Google introduces its advertising programs in Australia and opens a sales office in Sydney.

May - June
Google AdSense, a program designed to maximize the revenue potential of a website by serving highly relevant ads specific to the content of the page, launches with initial partners, including ABC.com, HowStuffWorks, Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc., Lycos Europe, Knight Ridder Digital, About.com, CNET and others. Google and MapQuest sign an agreement to display Google's sponsored links on MapQuest maps and directions pages. Google wins the Webby People's Voice Award for Technical Achievement. BtoB Magazine names Google the No. 3 top business-to-business advertising property. Google News wins a Webby Award in the News category and is expanded to local versions for English-language domains, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, U.K. and India. Version 2.0 of the Google Toolbar is released and includes new functions such as a pop-up blocker and autofill, which can automatically fill in the fields of a form with a user's information. Google introduces its advertising program in the Benelux region and opens a sales office in Amsterdam.

July - August
Google announces additional customers of the Google Search Appliance, including Xerox, Pfizer, the U.S. Army, Procter & Gamble, Nextel Communications, Hitachi Data Systems and others. Google launches new international domains including Denmark, Azerbaijan, El Salvador, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, India, Malaysia and Libya, bringing the total of Google's worldwide sites to 82. Google signs online weather site, weather.com, as a partner for its web search, AdWords and AdSense programs. A calculator function is launched, enabling users to solve mathematic problems by entering numeric expressions into the google.com or the Google Toolbar search boxes. The new version of the Google Toolbar that includes a pop-up blocker and form autofill, originally introduced in June 2003, is launched out of beta. Google News launches in German and French, the first non-English language versions of the news service.

September - October
Google Glossary is launched, enabling users to use the Google.com search field to retrieve definitions that Google has found on the Internet for a specific term or concept. Additionally, two new projects are made available on Google Labs – Search by Location, which enables users to find information by geographic location, and Google News Alerts, an automatic news alert system that notifies subscribers via e-mail about the latest Google News listings related to a specified subject. Google introduces enhancements to its AdWords service, including a conversion tracking tool and expanded match technology. Google continues its growth internationally, opening a new sales office in Madrid and introducing a beta version of Google News in Spanish.

November - December
The Google Deskbar, a free software download which enables users to search Google without using a web browser, is introduced on Google Labs. Google celebrates the 100th anniversary of flight with a special 'Wright Flyer' logo on its homepage. A new layout is unveiled for Froogle, Google's product search engine (beta) that enables users to search for millions of products across the web. Several new features are made available to Google AdWords users including a visual click-through rate indicator and a refined billing summary page. Slovakia is the latest domain to join the growing list of Google international domains. Several new search features are launched on Google.com that enable users to search for flight information, track USPS, UPS or Federal Express packages, and look up area codes and VIN information.

January - February
Brandchannel again names Google "Brand of the Year," as the site's index increases to 4.28 billion web pages. ABC News marks the occasion by naming Larry and Sergey "Persons of the Week." Google consolidates much of its Mountain View operations into a new headquarters building. And on February 17 Google announces an expanded web index with more than 6 billion items, comprised of 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages.

March - April
Google introduces personalized search on Google Labs, enabling users to specify their interests and to adjust the level of customization in their search results, based on that profile. On April 1, Google posts plans to open a research facility on the Moon and announces a new web-based mail service called Gmail that will include a gigabyte of free storage for each user. The service also includes a powerful search engine to locate and retrieve messages, which are displayed in a "conversation view" that chronologically arranges all emails sent or received with the same subject line. Gmail also includes relevant advertising delivered with the same technology that scans web pages as part of the AdSense service. The AdWords program itself is enhanced with the addition of local search targeting capability, enabling advertisers to specify a geographic range for delivery of their ads. On April 29, Google files with the SEC for an initial public offering (IPO).

May - June
On May 10, Blogger rolls out an upgraded version of its free web-based publishing software that enables users to create, collect, and share opinions and experiences with a global audience. And in June, Google announces a new version of the Google Search Appliance, which enables corporations, universities, and government agencies to deliver Google-quality search results on their intranets and public websites. The new Appliance has the capacity for more than 300 queries per minute and can scale from 150,000 to 15 million or more documents.

July - August
Google announces its acquisition of Picasa, Inc. on July 13. This Pasadena, Calif.-based digital photo management company helps users to organize, manage and share their digital photos. Picasa also makes Hello, a small application for posting photos to Blogger weblogs and also sharing them with friends using instant messenger technology.

August 19 marks the initial public offering of GOOG on NASDAQ through a little-known Dutch auction process, which is designed to attract a broader range of investors.

September - October
The second annual Code Jam, an event designed to attract the best and brightest among computer programmers, takes place on the Google campus with 50 finalists from around the world competing in a time-limited coding contest. The top coder is computer science student Sergio Sancho from the University of Buenos Aires, who wins the top prize of $10,000. On October 14 Google releases the first version of Google Desktop Search, a small free downloadable application for locating one's personal computer files (including email, work files, web history, and instant message chats) using Google-quality search. In September we also pass the milestone of having more than 100 Google domains (Norway and Kenya are #102 and #103).

A new beta offering in October is Google SMS, enabling people who are away from their computers to quickly and easily get instant, accurate answers to queries (like local business listings, dictionary definitions, or product prices) through text messaging, using a cell phone or handheld device such as a BlackBerry, by sending a query to the 5-digit U.S. shortcode 46645 (also GOOGL on most mobile phones).

Also in October we announce our first quarterly results as a public company, with record revenues of $805.9 million, up 105 percent year over year. And there's a new expanded alliance with AOL Europe to provide a comprehensive and relevant search and advertising experience to approximately 6.3 million members in the UK, France and Germany. Towards the end of October, Google announces the acquisition of Keyhole Corp., a digital and satellite image mapping company based in Google's own headquarter town, Mountain View, Calif. The acquisition gives Google users a powerful new search tool to view 3D images across earth as well as tap a rich database of roads, businesses and many other points of interest. And our European operations move into a new Dublin headquarters, with an official welcome from the Deputy Prime Minister, Mary Harney. The 150 Googlers who work here come from 35 countries and speak 17 languages – imperative for doing business across Europe.

Honors also come to our founders this month: Larry Page is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and he and Sergey Brin are named the 2004 Marconi Fellows, joining the august company of such previous winners as Tim Berners-Lee and Bob Metcalfe.

November - December
In a nod to Google's continuing international expansion, Nikesh Arora joins as senior executive overseeing Google's operations in the European market. Based in London, Arora, fresh from executive stints at T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom, is responsible for continuing to create and expand strategic partnerships in Europe. And elsewhere in the world – namely Tokyo – we announce a new R&D center to attract the best and brightest among Japanese and other Asian engineers. Also in November, the Google search index is now 8 billion pages.

Further expansion occurs in Kirkland, Washington, where we open a new engineering center, which joins the others in Mountain View, Santa Monica, New York City, Zurich, Bangalore, and Tokyo.

In December Google product launches include Google Groups 2, a new version of the venerable Usenet archive of 1 billion posts on thousands of topics that Google has managed since 2001. Now Google Groups enables users to create and manage their own email groups. And the Google Print program announces agreements with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google.

January - February
The Google Search Appliance spawns a new blue Google Mini, a smaller and lower-cost solution for small and medium-sized businesses that want Google quality search for their documents and sites. The Mini is the first (and only) Google hardware product to be sold only through the Google Store (www.googlestore.com) alongside branded Google consumer products. Google Video also launches – a new project that captures the closed-caption information on TV programming and makes it searchable. And fourth quarter earnings reveal record revenues of $1.032 billion for the quarter ending December 31, 2004 – up 101% year over year. Meanwhile, Google's Image Search contains more than 1 billion images of all types – photos, drawings, paintings, sketches, cartoons, posters, and more.

March - April
The latest version of Google Desktop Search rolls out, now with the ability to locate many more file types (such as PDF and MP3). It's available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch as well as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Google formally opens its Hyderabad office for AdWords support and QA projects – and it's home to Google's first cricket club too.

Another new feature launches in Google Local: Google Maps, a dynamic online mapping feature that enables users in the U.S. and Canada to find location information, navigate through maps, and get directions quickly and easily. Google Maps is distinguished by easy navigation, detailed route directions, and business locations in relation to the requested.