by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 27, 2017

Where were you in September of 1997? I worked at Ingram Micro, a computer distributor in Santa Ana, California. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University that year and decided to develop technology to organize all the world’s information.

While the concept of Google began 19 years ago in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who is now the CEO of YouTube, the company was not officially founded until the following year. The two set up an office in a garage and got to work creating google.com.

Analyst firm CB Insights estimates Google has made nearly 200 acquisitions since 2001. When the company reorganized and renamed as Alphabet in late 2015, the new structure refocused on non-advertising businesses, such as Calico (healthcare), Google X (self-driving cars and robots), and Nest (smart home).

Google announced Tuesday its most recent acquisition, Bitium, to support Google Cloud as more companies adopt cloud services. The increase requires new ways to manage cloud applications within an organization and ensure that correct security levels are in place. The company is known for identify management, and some of its customers include GroupM, Union General Insurance, and Kimbel.

More than 200 acquisitions and about 4.5 billion users in 160 countries later, Google is celebrating its nineteenth birthday with a search spinner Google Doodle with a link to 19 games and surprises the company introduced throughout the years, as well as a new search easter egg, Snake Game.

One interesting search engine optimization fact about Google: the company owns a domain of common misspellings of its name such as Gooogle.com and Googlr.com. It also owns 466453.com, which on a mobile phone spells out the company’s name.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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