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It is a year now since Google launched its free e-mail service, known as Gmail, with one gigabyte inboxes, much more than had been provided up till then by its competitors. The anniversary of this launch is as good a reason as any to discuss the internet's leading search engine.

But before we do, it would be a good idea to take a quick look at the history of this North-American company, headquartered at Silicon Valley (California, USA), the cradle of the internet and of many of the most important technology firms in the US.

Although Google Inc. was not actually born until 1998, the company's history goes back to 1995, when two programmers, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then aged 24 and 23 respectively, met at Stanford University in California. Soon after, Page and Brin were putting their energy into the creation of an algorithm (a method of calculus) for searching for data and in 1996 they began to develop the BackRub search engine, the precursor to Google.

Finally, in the summer of 1998, the Google company was officially born. It was initially located in a garage with just four employees. But these were the beginnings of a company that today enjoys enormous influence and growth.