Google Search turns 20 years old on Thursday. It was the first product from the tech giant now known as Alphabet Inc, and Google has been celebrating the milestone all week on social media. Google, that came into existence 20 years ago from a garage, today has seven products that are used by more than a billion people every month.
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The exact date of the company's founding is up for debate - even for those who are in the business of providing answers.
"Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, but for more than a decade we've celebrated our birthday on September 27, with an annual Doodle, of course," the company said in a blog post earlier this month.
Instead of a handful of employees in a Menlo Park garage, Google today has tens of thousands of employees and offices in nearly 60 countries.
As the company marks its 20th birthday this month, it will spend some time looking back on what it has accomplished in the past two decades, starting with the 10th birthday of Chrome.
"We're still pushing the boundaries of available technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence. And we're still dedicated first and foremost to the user, to building products for everyone," said Google on the occasion.
Under the leadership of Sundar Pichai and riding on Search engine and YouTube growth, Google's revenue jumped 26 per cent to $23.3 billion in the second quarter in 2018.
Traffic acquisition costs, a key metric in Google's ad business, went up to 23 per cent of ad revenue in the second quarter.
Google's parent company Alphabet reported $26.24 billion in revenue for the quarter that ended on June 30 - making a profit of $3.2 billion while beating Wall Street expectations.
Search engine for scientific community
Earlier this month, Google had launched a new search engine for the scientific community that will help them make sense of millions of datasets present online.
The service, called Dataset Search, will help scientists, data journalists and geeks find the data required for their work and their stories - or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.
The new search engine will work like Google Scholar, the company's popular search engine for academic studies and reports.
To create Dataset search, Google developed guidelines for dataset providers to describe their data in a way that the company (and other search engines) can better understand the content of their pages.
Google then collects and links this information, analyses where different versions of the same dataset might be, and finds publications that may be describing or discussing the dataset.
People can find references to most datasets in environmental and social sciences, as well as data from other disciplines including government data and data provided by news organisations, such as ProPublica.
Dataset Search works in multiple languages with support for additional languages coming soon.
(With agency inputs)
