Reuters Posted online: Friday, August 20, 2004 at 1145 hours IST
Seattle, August 20: Following are some key dates in the history of Google Inc., the Web's most popular search engine, which went public on Thursday.
1995
--March - Sergey Brin, originally from Moscow, and Larry Page, from Michigan, who are Google's co-founders, meet at a spring gathering of new Stanford University Ph.D. computer science candidates.
--Sept. 7 - Google is incorporated and takes up residence in a Menlo Park, California, garage with four employees, after Brin and Page put their studies on hold and raise $1 million in funding from family, friends and "angel" investors. Brin and Page are 24 and 25 years old, respectively.
1999
--February-June - Google receives $25 million in funding from venture capital funds Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
2000
--May-June - Google, answering 18 million search queries a day, becomes the largest search engine on the Web. Internet media company Yahoo Inc. picks Google as its default search results provider.
2001
--March-April - Eric Schmidt, then the chairman and chief executive of Novell and a former chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems Inc., joins Google as chairman. He soon is appointed CEO.
2002
--March-April - Google launches a beta version of Google News, which provides news stories from numerous global providers.
--September-October - Google rolls out its keyword advertising program worldwide, making it available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan.
2003
--January-February - Google acquires Pyra Labs, creator of the Web self-publishing tool Blogger.
--May-June - Google launches AdSense, an advertising program that delivers ads based on the content of Web sites.
2004
--February - Yahoo begins rolling out its own Web search technology, phasing out Google.
--March 31 - Google announces its free ad-supported e-mail service, Gmail. The move came amid rising competition from Yahoo and Microsoft Corp., which have built strong user bases around free e-mail and are attacking Google's main search business.
--April 29 - Google files with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its IPO.
--July 12 - Google said it will list on the Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., shunning the New York Stock Exchange. It later disclosed its Nasdaq stock symbol, GOOG.O.
--July 26 - Google discloses it will sell 24.6 million shares at a price between $108 and $135, valuing the company at more than $36 billion.
--July 30 - Google starts taking registrations for bidders on its Web site.
--August 5 - Google discloses that it may have illegally issued shares and options to employees past and present, and offers to buy them back.
--August 9 - Google raises the number of shares it plans to sell to 25.7 million, after saying it will issue 2.7 million shares to Yahoo to settle a lawsuit over technology used to display ads.
--August 12 - Google closes bidder registrations.
--August 13 - Google starts taking bids for its IPO auction. An interview with the founding Brin and Page is published in Playboy Magazine, prompting an informal SEC inquiry that could delay the IPO.
--August 16 - Google asks the SEC to declare its registration statement effective, the first step in setting a price and issuing shares to the public.
--August 18 - Google cuts the number of shares it is offering to the public to 19.6 million shares and lowered its target share price range to between $85 and $95. Google closed the auction, priced its shares at $85 and got the go-ahead for its public offering from the SEC.
--August 19 -- Google opens at $100.01, up 18 percent from its offering price.
