From garage to globe, Google celebrates 10th anniversary

[Guchi_Jnr]

The world's leading internet search engine Google is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its existence.

Google began life in a garage and now has a market value of nearly $200 billion.

In the last decade, Google has constantly expanded and diversified with products like g-mail, Google docs for word processing and spread sheets, Picasa for picture editing, YouTube's video sharing service, Google Earth and maps and the launch just last week of a new internet browser called Chrome.

I remember back in '98, I was sharing a house in Melbourne with a girl that worked at IBM, and she came home one night and said "Forget about AltaVista, Yahoo & excite.. Check out this new search engine called Google".. Haven't used any of those since!

(remember it was '98, because I moved to Japan in Jan of '99)

[Tuffty]

And to think, its worth more than Disney and McDonald's combined

[Asmodai]

Wow. Impressive.

I'm a little wary of investing a lot in Google - it doesn't have the control Microsoft has over legacy stuff, so it always seems like it's one generational leap from being as irrelevant as Yahoo! is now.

[StreakInTheSky]

Well Yahoo really hasn't changed much in the past 10 years. And most of the others were pretty much the same.

With live feeds and google's search engine, the need for web portals like Yahoo have become irrelevant. The main reason some of those companies are even still there is probably cause they were able to aquire a bunch of other little web companies.

Google seems to be the company that waits to see where internet trends are heading and then tries to cut in front of everyone a year or two later. They don't need to worry about legacy stuff, they're a web based company, so as long as there's internet anyone can use google's stuff.

And in the end, even if the new stuff they come out with doesn't work as they plan, they'll always have the search engine. I doubt some new search engine will just pop up that's "better" than google to take its place. If anything were to become a threat, they could just aquire it like they did when Youtube did better than google video.