Here's a look back at some stops along the way as Google rose to the status of Internet giant. Among the milestones are the founders of Google, stock price changes, annual revenue, number of employees, key hires and key developments.
Larry Page
Sergey Brin
Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. They met in the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, where they worked together on the project that became Google.
$85 per share -- Aug. 19, 2004
$201.60 per share -- 2004*
$446.21 per share -- 2005*
$513 per share -- 2006*
* 52-week high
$86 million -- 2001
$439 million -- 2002
$1.4 billion -- 2003
$3.1 billion -- 2004
$6.1 billion -- 2005
$9.3 billion -- 2006
3 -- 1998
8 -- 1999
60 -- 2000
** -- 2001
** -- 2002
1,628 -- 2003
3,021 -- 2004
5,680 -- 2005
9,378 -- 2006
** Unavailable
Laszlo Bock, vice president of people
Ivan Ernest, HR leader, engineering and operations
Stacy Sullivan, chief cultural officer
Shona Brown, vice president of business operations
Craig Silverstein, director of technology
Omid Kordestani, vice president of business development and sales
Urs Hölzle, vice president of engineering
1999 -- Red Hat, whose open-source operating system is called Linux, becomes first commercial search customer.
2000 -- Partnership with Yahoo! leads to 18 million user queries answered daily.
2001 -- Dr. Eric Schmidt, former Novell chief and Sun Microsystems CTO, named CEO.
2002 -- America Online calls Google ?the reigning champ of online search.?
2003 -- Groundbreaking AdSense program offers Web sites of all sizes a way to easily generate revenue through placement of highly targeted ads adjacent to their content.
2004 -- Google files with the SEC for an initial public offering.
2005 -- Google Earth technology enables users to click on satellite photos and zoom into specific locations.
2006 -- Google acquires YouTube, a major online destination whose users view more than 70 million videos daily.