

Up until 2007, Google Apps had been free for all users. October 2006 was also the official birth month of Google Docs, as evidenced by this celebratory video from October 11, 2021: Later in 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65bn. In October 2006, Google introduced an apps package for schools, called Google Apps for Education. Page Creator was eventually replaced with Google Sites in 2008. The app lets users build basic web pages without HTML or CSS knowledge. Page Creator – website creation and hosting application. The app launched in 2006 and was designed to integrate with Gmail so users could quickly add events from their email to their calendar. The Talk app was eventually incorporated into the Hangouts app in 2013.Ĭalendar – Google’s fully online calendar. Talk – Talk which was an IM application, provided users with text and voice messaging capability. It was also the first email client that strung related emails together in a conversation, a standard often overlooked today. Gmail was free and offered users 1GB of storage space, which was significantly more than its competitors at the time. Gmail – Gmail was initially launched in 2004. The initial package included several apps that have evolved into the Google Workspace apps many people use today, including: On August 28th, 2006, Google launched Google Apps for Your Domain, which was free for all. 2006 – Google Apps for Your Domain Launches Google now has eight products that each have more than a billion users, one of which is Google Workspace.īut long before there was Workspace, there was Google Apps for Your Domain. In the twenty-three years since its launch, Google’s parent company Alphabet has rapidly expanded to become the third-largest tech company in the world, by market cap. The name comes from the term “googol”, which is the digit “1” followed by a hundred zeros. In September 1998, Page and Brin founded Google LLC. While initially successful, the search engine quickly used up half of Stanford’s bandwidth, and once even brought down the entire site. In 1996, Page and Brin launched Google on the Stanford University website. Combined, BackRub and the PageRank algorithm made up the foundation of the Google we know today. The PageRank algorithm used data generated by Backrub to rank webpages based on how well they linked with other webpages. Once BackRub was up and running, Page teamed up with Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford graduate, to create the PageRank algorithm. BackRub was a program that indexed pages on the web and recorded how many links they had to other sites. Page believed that the number of incoming links should influence a webpage’s search engine results page ranking. Popular search engines at the time hadn’t accounted for the number of incoming links each webpage had. It all started in the mid-’90s when Stanford graduate Larry Page noticed something the other internet search engines were missing.


Today, Google’s business productivity suite, Google Workspace, has over 6 million paying customers. It took less than a decade for Google to dominate the internet search engine market.
