Few days ago, Google released a video describing how their search engine has evolved in the past 15 years or so. In the video, some of the top executives in Google’s engineering team such as Ben Gomes and Amit Singhal and more, are elaborating on major milestones in Google’s history (which is basically also the search history).

It is pretty amazing to see how a little research project in Stanford University by two ambitious students (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) back in 1996, has developed to the most powerful and influential company on the Internet. Note that the video doesn’t highlight search algorithm updates history, but more general major features like AdWords, News, Images and Instant.

If you are looking for the reason why Google became such a successful company in the video, i think you can find it if you connect between what Ben Gomes and Amit Singhal are saying when they relates to the beginning of Google:

• Ben Gomes: “There was a huge explosion of content on the web, bigger explosion of information than it ever happened before, and it was increasingly hard to find the piece of content you wanted”.
• Amit Singhal: “Google was started based upon algorithm that Larry and Sergey have developed in Stanford, called Pagerank algorithm and they use that algorithm to indeed build a very novel real search in the web”.

How will the future of search would look like? The video doesn’t provide a clear answer, only the vision of Amit Singhal- It will be possible to walk up to a computer, ask him for the solution or answer for some complex question and receive it while the users become much more knowledgeable.

At any case, here is The Evolution of Search video: