DIGITAL - After 18 Years, Google is Still at the Top

Log into Google today and you will see a special birthday doodle complete with balloons and streamers.

Google was officially launched in 1998 and celebrates its 18th birthday today.

It all began when Larry Page, a grad student at Stanford University, started working on a new search engine called BackRub as his doctoral thesis.

Sergey Brin, another grad student, partnered with Page on the development of the engine which used an innovative approach to finding pages ranked by relevancy.

The search engine was renamed Google - a play on the word ‘googol’ which is a number represented by a one followed by a hundred zeros - and Page and Brin dropped out of grad school to launch Google as a startup.

Leaving school turned out to be a great decision as the business went from an office set up in a garage in 1998  to a multinational technology company employing over 57,000 people today.

Google dominates the search engine market with a consistent market share of over 60% year after year. 

If anyone is looking for answers or information, the response is "Google it!"

The closest competitor in 2016 is Microsoft with 21%, and Yahoo following with 12% of the U.S. market.