“In 50 or 100 years, when the real histories of the internet get written, it will start with those two boys.” – Andrew Keen

Ten years ago two students formally formed Google Inc. at a friend’s garage as a research project. Two Stanford Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started the project because they were unhappy with current search technology. Today their company is the world’s fastest growing company and worth £75 billion, with more than £2 billion profit last year alone.

Now Google will celebrate its tenth anniversary.

Brands expert Simon Myers, boss at consultancy firm Figtree, told The Sun: “It’s amazing that they have got to the top of so many brand rankings in just ten years. Google is a very successful because it has a clear purpose – to make searching the internet as quick and as easy as possible. They have put the user first.”

Yet talking about the launch of Google, the company almost didn’t happen as they struggled for two years to get funding for their project. But the first funding was secured when Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, gave them a cheque for $100,000 made out to a corporation which did not yet exist.

A decade later Google seems out to world domination. Since 2001, Google has acquired several small start-up companies. In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, creators of Blogger, a weblog publishing platform.

Two years ago they bought up the popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. The company just launched a new web browser called Google Chrome to challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Its online encyclopedia, Knol, is a challenger to Wikipedia.

Back in 2006, the verb, “google”, was officially added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning, “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.”