A decade ago, a new company called Google was born in California. Google's 10th birthday has an ironic mathematical origin. Google was named by two young Stanford University engineering graduate students in misspelt homage to the word "googol" – an infinity-like number denoting 10 to the power of 100 (that's the number one followed by a hundred zeros).But the irony is that, in its first 10 years, Google has achieved googel-like growth, ratcheting up the ones and zeros faster than any other company in the history of global capitalism.
The company has gone from a start-up with zero revenue to the best-known brand in the world with almost 20,000 employees, a market cap of around $150bn, annual income in 2007 of $16bn and a truly ubiquitous search-engine which indexes tens of billions of web pages, serves billions of daily requests and fields 66 per cent of all web searches. This pre-adolescent Silicon Valley company has become both the lead actor and the most complex metaphor of our digital age.
If you like too see the Google evolution and remember funny stuff from Google, you can visit the tenth birthday site that Google has created for the purpose... Enjoy.
