Google’s corporate history page has a pretty strong background on Google, starting from when Larry met Sergey at Stanford right up to present day. In 1995 Larry Page met Sergey Brin at Stanford.

By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website. Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™ bricks, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department’s loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network.

A year later, their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen it. Buzz about the new search technology began to build as word spread around campus.

In 1998, Google was launched. Sergey tried to shop their PageRank technology, but nobody was interested in buying or licensing their search technology at that time.

Email: Google launched Gmail on March 31, 2004, offering search email search and gigabytes of storage space.

Google went public at $85 a share on August 19, 2004 and its first trade was at 11:56 am ET at $100.01.

Google News: Google News launched in beta in September 2002. On September 6, 2006, Google announced an expanded Google News Archive Search that goes back over 200 years.

Google Book Search: On October 6, 2004, Google launched Google Book Search.

Maps: On October 27, 2004, Google bought Keyhole. On February 8, 2005, Google launched Google Maps.

Google Scholar: On November 18, 2004, Google launched Google Scholar, an academic search program.

Analytics: On March 29, 2005, Google bought Urchin, a website traffic analytics company. Google renamed the service Google Analytics.

Google Blog Search: On September 14, 2005, Google announced Google Blog Search.

Google Base: On November 15, 2005, Google announced the launch of Google Base, a database of uploaded information describing online or offline content, products, or services.

Radio ads: Google bought dMarc Broadcasting on January 17, 2006.

Google Video: On January 6, 2006, Google announced Google Video.

Google Universal Search: On May 16, 2007 Google began mixing many of their vertical results into their organic search results.

Office productivity software: on March 9, 2006, Google bought Writely, an online collaborative document creating and editing software product.

Calendar: on April 14, 2006, Google launched Google Calendar, which allows you to share calendars with multiple editors and include calendars in web pages.

Checkout: On June 29, 2006, Google launched Google Checkout, a way to store your personal transaction related information online.

Google continues to add valuable services and now has tons of free tools like Google Voice, Gmail, Google Places, Google Profiles, Google This, Google That!