Google turns 25 on Monday.
The world’s most popular search engine began as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both graduate students at Stanford University in the late 1990s.
Working from their dorm rooms, they developed a new search engine algorithm that ranked websites based on the number of other websites they linked to, and called it PageRank. This algorithm proved to be much more efficient than existing algorithms, and Google quickly became the most popular search engine on the web.
Last month, Google held about 92% of the global market. Its closest competitor, Bing, had about 3% market share, followed by Yahoo with just over 1%.
The name Google comes from the mathematical term “googol”, meaning the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The choice of this name reflects the intention of the founders to systematize large amounts of information.
Over the years, the Google search engine has become an integral part of our daily lives, defining how we search, communicate and interact with information on the Internet.
In 2006, the Oxford Dictionary added “google” as a verb for searching for information on the Internet, regardless of the search engine used.
In the same year, Google launched Google Trends, an online platform that provides access to the trillions of search queries that are performed worldwide every year. At the end of each year, Google announces a “Year of Research” that summarizes the major events, personalities, and trends that captured the world’s attention that year.
Oltre La Linea collected all these reports and displayed the five most popular searches in the world from 2003 to 2022.
What categories were searched the most?
To get a better idea of what categories these 100 search terms fall into, we’ve grouped them into six categories:
- Person, celebrity, politician (38 matches)
- Technology Products (27 matches)
- Sport’s event (15 matches)
- Catastrophe, accident (eight performances)
- Movie, TV show, song (seven performances)
- Another (five performances)
The most popular category was people, celebrities or politicians: 38% of all appearances. Among these achievements were Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Nelson Mandela, Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth II.
Tech products came in second with 27 appearances. These include Myspace, Facebook, Apple iPhone, Pokemon Go and Zoom.
Then there were sporting events with 15 appearances, including several World Cups, the NBA and more than a few major cricket matches.
Eight times there have been natural disasters and accidents, including Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 tsunami, Ebola, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and COVID-19.
Films, TV shows and songs have seven hits including Harry Potter, The Matrix, American Idol, Gangnam Style and Black Panther.
Other popular searches include Ice Bucket Challenge, Paris, Election Results, Wordle, and Ukraine.