google


What looked like Google at the beginning ?
The wonderful website Internet Archive lets you travel back in time thanks to its Wayback Machine !
Here is what Google looked like ...

... in december 1998 :















... in 1999, the purified style that we know :
















... in 2000, a funny thing :
















... in 2001, a tour :














note : not all logos were archived, unfortunately

In 1998, we could read:

Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page to make it easier to find high-quality information on the web. The company is based on three years of research in web search and data mining done by the founders in the Stanford University Computer Science Department. Google Inc.'s headquarters are located in scenic downtown Palo Alto, California.

Google Inc. is not at present a publicly traded company, and we are currently unable to speculate on whether or when our privately-held status might change.

10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling "Google" better. We picked the name "Google" because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters.

For pleasure : google in the time.
for those who do not know :

Pour ceux qui ne savent pas : Data Mining, also known as Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD), is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns. Data Mining is a fairly recent and contemporary topic in computing. However, Data Mining applies many older computational techniques from statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. As usual, wikipedia is full of details. On the french website, we find this anecdote:

The first tests of excavations of data were done historically on million sales tickets of a supermarket, as memorized by the cash registers. At the origin of the popularization of the methods and algorithms, there would have been the description by the Wal-Mart stores of a very strong correlation between the purchase of layers for babies and beers, every saturday afternoon. The analysts realized that men are sent by their housewives to buy the bulky packages of layers for baby. Thus, the shops were reorganized to present the beer next to the babies stuff. Sales climbed out of arrow! This veracious image illustrates the return on investment (ROI) of datamining and more generally of decisional data processing.

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