For much of the past two decades, almost everyone in the world began their online journey using Google’s search engine. They opened a web browser, typed in their query and were whisked off to another part of the internet.
It seems obvious now that this is how the internet was designed to be used, but in the early days, this wasn’t the case. Millions of websites were hosted on servers across the world but there was no accessible index that catalogued them all.
Then, in the early 1990s, Jerry Yang and David Filo from Stanford created “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. It quickly gained popularity, and was renamed Yahoo in 1994. A few years later, two other Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started working on their own search engine project, going on to found Google in 1998.