It may be hard to believe, but it has been 12 years since the Google search engine first invaded the Internet. Boy, how time flies. It started just as a ‘search engine that could’ to now be the leading search engine worldwide. The range of services and products that Google now offers has augmented its position as a search engine market leader.

This is how the Google home page looked 12 years ago. Certainly quite different to its clean, white space page we have today.

The idea of Google started back in 1998 with two guys with no money, working out of a garage, trying to serve up faster and more accurate results than search giants like Yahoo and AltaVista—and they succeeded.

Larry Page and Sergy Brin had successfully created a search engine that gave results faster and more accurately than any other. The factors of speed and relevance have defined the search marketing industry ever since.

Here’s a brief overview of Google’s massive growth in these twelve years:

- In 1998 Google indexed 25 million web pages in total. Now it indexes millions per day. Google is valued at over $170 billion. Page and Brin are worth $15 billion each, more than double what Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook founder) and Steve Jobs (Apple Founder & CEO) are worth put together.

- Google has come a long way and today is a worthy competitor for giants like Microsoft. Though in principle Google still is a search engine trying to index and make accessible all the world’s information. Google dominates the search marketing business- making money hand over fist from all their various ad platforms and networks.

Of course Google has had its share of troubles- it has come under fire for violating privacy, especially with its ‘street view’. But for all the allegations and criticism leveled at it, Google has come up with a clear and quick response through the official Google blog.

The search giant has based its immense growth on open source technology and fostering a continual dialogue with developers.

12 years is a long time to survive in the online/tech world, but what some of our readers might not know is that ineedhits is actually older than Google. Our CEO, Clay Cook started ineedhits back in 1996 from his parent’s house.

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