Happy 13th Birthday Google!

It’s hard to think of a world without search engines. From the moment I wake up, search engines let me check whether my trains are running on time or not, allowing me to forgo breakfast or treat myself to something nice before my morning commute. As soon as I’ve stepped into work, I’ve got emails from clients and team members waiting for me in my inbox and my day to day work heavily involves me interacting with various services around the web, with a heavy emphasis on one in particular: Google.

The search giant celebrated its thirteenth birthday last week with the usual minimalist fanfare it’s well known for. But thinking about it, what was I using 13 years ago to navigate my way around the internet?

From the moment my parents brought a computer home to the day we started using one in school, my PC was only seen as a gaming machine. MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 ruled the computing roost and I’d only ever used it to play Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D. A few years later, my parents made the decision to get a ‘latest’ model with Windows 95.

This new computer also brought home my first experience with the internet. Back then it was only used to call my father’s family in Mauritius, using a primitive version of what we now consider to be VOIP. But I remember that those early days of the internet were rather dark. There wasn’t much to do online and search engines were not commonly the main port of call when logging on, it certainly wasn’t a vital part of our everyday lives.

As the years went on and technology and society evolved around the Internet, search engines became more and more prevalent and I remember heavily using Yahoo!’s search engine for quite a while. But I remember one defining moment for me, the day I was introduced to Google. Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves both prided themselves on providing as much information as possible, but Google was unique in that it was a clean interface that didn’t have any clutter at all. It simply provided me with 10 clear and relevant results for whatever I was searching for.

The day I was first introduced to Google changed my online behaviour completely. If I knew where I was going, I’d simply type that URL in the address bar, but searching on Google was manna from heaven that made navigating around the giant ocean that is the World Wide Web a much easier job.

Thirteen years later and most of my online navigation starts with Google (not only because it’s my homepage). Google News is now my go to source for aggregating what’s going on around the world and Google Maps has to be the de facto standard of online mapping across the world. However Gmail isn’t for my preferred email service as I’m still a Microsoft die-hard at heart and Facebook and Twitter are enough social networks for me.

With increased competition from Microsoft’s Bing service, it has been tempting to try and live a Google free online life lately. And it’s been interesting to see how Google have responded to services that Microsoft had debuted first through Bing, only to have their thunder stolen by the search engine giant. One things for sure though, here’s to hoping the company has another successful 13 years ahead of them.