They say it’s your birthday….

That’s right as I learned from the Google Doodle this morning it’s Google’s 14th birthday, they grow up so fast…

Google is a web search engine. For those of you who don’t know, “web search engines” are designed to search for information on the Internet. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a specialist in web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.

It’s crazy to believe that for some of the population out there nothing has ever existed outside of Google as far as search engines go, but as I in my late mid-late 20’s I remember a time that Google didn’t exist, gasp! And I’m not talking about the time before the internet existed. The first search engine was created in 1993 and it was called W3Catalog followed up shortly after by Aliweb (which are both inactive at this point).

As more people embraced computers and the Internet the concept of building a bigger and better search engine resulted in a variety of competitors popping up and vying for popularity. In the early days of search engines when Google was nowhere to be found, you could use sites like Magellan, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves (now known as Ask.com), Lycos, Excite, Dogpile and HotBot to find the answers you sought.

I can’t really remember when Google first entered my consciousness but they came onto the search engine scene in 1998. It’s said that their popularity rose because of their use of a new system for searching called Page Rank, where a website’s relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site. And you can’t beat their unofficial slogan, “Don’t be evil.” 

All I can say is that I’m happy Google became the juggernaut that it is now, if only to stop the madness with ridiculous search engine names (not that Google is much better) plus without them we wouldn’t have Google Maps or Street View, Google Docs, Google Chrome and slew of other amazing things. And without Google how else am I supposed to find all those “dating a nerd” related activities?