Ten years of Google
Nowadays, if they wanted to treat themselves, Page and Brin could probably just buy Burger King. Their start-up has become a multi-billion-dollar, era-defining colossus. More than three quarters of online searches in Britain go through Google, 100 million queries a day. To Google is not just a verb, but a lifestyle, a gateway to an unprecedented hoard of information.
Google succeeded for one simple reason: it, more than any other site, found you what you were looking for. At the time, the internet was exploding in size. The dominant site, Yahoo, offered a manually updated directory, and was being swamped. Other search engines, such as AltaVista, could map the web, but had problems sorting the results.