Google

Appearances

1. September 4, 1998Google FoundedStanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search company built around PageRank—an algorithm that estimated importance from the link structure of the web. Where the leading engines of the day (Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite) depended on human directories and keyword matching, Google's ranking was fully algorithmic and its interface stripped to a single screen. It became a leading search engine within six months.
2. February 2005YouTube FoundedThree former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—founded a service on which anyone could upload and share video. The spread of Flash Video and the dominance of the Adobe Flash browser plugin at the time made friction-free in-browser playback possible for the first time. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65 billion. Through the 2010s it grew into a distribution platform of broadcast-television scale.
3. April 2008Google App Engine — An Early PaaSGoogle launched App Engine, a service on which developers wrote application code that ran on Google's infrastructure. By hiding the OS and the virtual machine entirely and exposing only the application layer, it became an early implementation of what would be called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk descend from this line.
4. September 23, 2008Android 1.0 and the HTC DreamThe first shipping device—HTC Dream, sold in the US as the T-Mobile G1—running the OS Google had acquired with the 2005 purchase of Android Inc. A Linux kernel, a Java VM (later replaced by the Android Runtime), and a custom UI stack: Google's strategy of supplying an open-source smartphone OS was the inverse of Apple's, and over the next decade and a half grew into an ecosystem accounting for more than 70% of the world's smartphones.
5. November 2009Go Released — GoogleA systems programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson (the UNIX author). Starting from frustration with C++ build times and complexity, it combined garbage collection, lightweight concurrency via goroutines, and a deliberately simple syntax. Most of the cloud-native infrastructure of the 2010s—Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus—is written in Go.
6. June 2014Kubernetes — Container Orchestration from GoogleGoogle open-sourced Kubernetes, a container orchestrator designed from the experience of its internal Borg system (a cluster manager it had run for years). Donated to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under the Linux Foundation in 2015. By the 2020s, Kubernetes was the de facto standard for managing fleets of containers declaratively, integrated into AWS, GCP, and Azure alike.
7. March 15, 2016AlphaGo Defeats Lee SedolDeepMind's AlphaGo won its five-game series against Lee Sedol, one of the world's top Go players, 4–1. The combinatorial explosion of Go had long been thought to put a machine victory at least a decade away; the combination of Monte Carlo tree search and deep reinforcement learning broke that wall. Move 37 in Game 2—'the divine move'—introduced a placement so unlike anything a human player would have chosen that the professional Go community discussed it for weeks.
8. June 2017"Attention Is All You Need" — The Transformer PaperAshish Vaswani and colleagues at Google Brain and Google Research proposed the Transformer—a sequence-to-sequence architecture built solely on self-attention. It displaced the RNN and LSTM, the prevailing NLP architectures, with a structure that parallelised easily and trained efficiently. By 2026 the paper had been cited more than 150,000 times; every modern large language model (BERT, the GPT family, Claude, Gemini) is a descendant.