The first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.
What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.
This year, The Verge is exploring how Google Search has reshaped the web into a place for robots — and how the emergence of AI threatens Google itself.
- What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers?
- How Google tried to fix the web — by taking it over
- The store is for humans, the storefront...
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