28 years of Google: a developer’s journey through the web
Google turns 28. Its very first steps trace back to 4 September 1998, right on the eve of a new millennium that would be profoundly shaped by the tech giant. Realistically, only people in their forties today can confirm that there was a ‘before‘ to what eventually became the search engine par excellence.
The first queries in the early 90s were entrusted to AltaVista, back when an Internet connection was not yet a privilege found in every home. In cybercafés, with the timer ticking down relentlessly, there was a ravenous hunt for information to quickly save onto floppy disks and study offline later.
Only those over fifty have fully appreciated the impact on their work brought about by the market entry of a project born from the intuition of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University students driven by the desire to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible.
From PageRank to SEO: the web becomes a profession
To ensure proper positioning for their web pages, IT technicians soon had to reckon with PageRank: a secret algorithm and, as such, subject to endless interpretations fuelled by the trickle of details Google released over time. Page structure and content were constantly built and torn down in pursuit of top performance, driven by the mirage of reaching the top of the first page of results.
SEO became a trade at the intersection of technical skill and a pinch of magic, often grappling with the frustration of seeing no direct proportion between practical results and the sheer volume of work put in by developers.
Hand in hand with these new challenges came the introduction of various support tools, from Analytics to AdWords, by way of Search Console, Tag Manager, and Ads. These were vital for commercial clients, who were driven by the ineradicable suspicion (repeatedly debunked, to be fair) that purchasing paid ad space would also boost their organic search rankings.
The launch of every new tool brought the need to integrate it into websites. Memorable were the struggles to install the very first widgets (and not just Google’s…) onto pages via HTML and JavaScript. Fortunately, over time, these tools became easier to use, better documented, and higher-performing.
Beyond search: Google as a developer’s companion
Google is not just synonymous with web search; it offers a wide array of tools for productivity and interaction. Starting with Gmail, which tested technicians from its earliest days as they worked to ensure that automatically generated emails from web portals didn’t end up in the spam folder and rendered correctly.
It is impossible to forget Google Maps, increasingly present and integrated into websites, not just as a way to suggest the best routes in the physical world, but as a framework for efficient content organisation through API calls, almost always powered by JSON data.
For a web developer, Google has been not only a battlefield, but also the headquarters for finding any kind of support. It is common practice to paste a tricky snippet of code into the search bar in the hope (often not in vain) of discovering, perhaps by scrolling to the very last page of results or refining key terms—that a colleague in another corner of the world faced and solved the exact same problem.
From search to AI: what comes next?
It is precisely in their role as users that technicians have come to appreciate Google’s new direction. The adoption of AI has transformed long-tail keywords into a genuine dialogue with the search engine.
Naturally, every time Google raises the bar, developers must do the same, starting with the concept of SEO, which needs to be completely redefined in the era of artificial intelligence.
The future, as always, has contours that are not yet clearly defined. But one thing is certain: COMMpla has followed Google’s evolution step by step, and will continue to do so, ensuring products aligned with the most modern technologies.
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Massimo Berutto | Senior Software Developer