CROPfm Forum

It's the success story to beat all internet success stories.

Ten years ago, on 7 September 1998, two young graduate students at Stanford University incorporated a company with the (then) odd-sounding name "Google".

Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are billionaires. Their company is hugely profitable; between April and June this year alone, it reported a turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn) and generated a net profit of $1.25bn (the first quarter was even more profitable).

Ten years ago, when there were far fewer websites than there are today, a couple of guys living in Stanford's Escondido Village got the idea to create an easy-to-use, searchable directory so friends and family could easily find the net's newest, coolest destinations.

"For a little while, we had our main office in Sergey's dorm room, one of our founders, our machine room was in Larry's dorm, the other founder, and eventually, we found space for us, and space for our machines out of Stanford in the house of a friend of ours," remembers Craig Silverstein, who holds the distinction of being Google's employee #1.

Ten years ago this month, Google's first employee turned up at the garage where the search engine was originally housed. What technology at a similar early stage today will have changed our world as much by 2018?

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.