In 1998, Bill Gross launched GoTo.com. It was a pioneering search site that introduced pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. PPC works by auctioning search results to the highest bidder. Yahoo acquired GoTo and renamed it Overture. Overture wasn’t a top search destination. But it laid the groundwork for the now-standard PPC advertising model. Page and Brin placed Google under Eric Schmidt’s leadership as CEO. Under his leadership, it evolved PPC further with AdWords in 2002.

They called it “Backrub.” In 1997, the name changed to Google, a misspelling of “googol” — a term representing a 1 followed by 100 zeros. In a 1998 email, Google co-founder Larry Page used the word “googling”. The term gained significant popularity. Pop culture started to reference Google, such as on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in 2002. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had no formal business plan. They received a $100,000 investment from ...

In the early nineties, finding useful information on the internet was challenging. This was due to the rudimentary nature of search engines. They often functioned more like directories. Both Yahoo! Search and LookSmart launched in 1995. In 1996, two guys from Berkeley, California, founded Ask Jeeves. This search engine was innovative at the time. Users asked “Jeeves” questions rather than searching with keywords. They launched it in 1997, but Ask Jeeves had limitations.