JOHN HARRIS wishes Google a happy birthday as it turns 10 and has a look at its new Chrome browser.

I discovered this week that the Big Kahuna of the Internet age, Google, is just eight months older than my daughter.

How much the world has changed since the late 90s when we used modems to view static websites and parenting involved sleepless night and disposable nappies.

I first heard of Google several months before my little girl was born when my mate Dave Hellaby told me to check out “the thinking man’s search engine”.

At the time, I was using Alta Vista for search, which I thought was pretty slick compared to the cluttered portal affairs like Yahoo.

But moving to Google was like climbing into a Ferrari after driving across the Nullabor in a Kombi.

Google turns 10 this month: The company is claimed to have incorporated on September 7, 1998 (although this is disputed) and registered its www.google.com web address on September 15 (which is not disputed). So happy birthday to the big G.

In its first decade, the start-up company founded by students Sergey Brin and Larry Page has grown to employ nearly 20,000 people in 20 countries with a  market value of about $150 billion.

Internet ratings agency Nielsen estimates that 9.7 million Australians use the Google search engine every month – and I must admit I do my bit for those results.

The interesting thing about Google’s success is that it hasn’t stuck to it knitting.

While it continues to invest squillions in refining its search algorithms and populating the planet with server farms beyond measure, it has launched many other interesting initiatives.

I’ve previously written about how the “cloud computing” approach epitomised by Google– where software applications live online in the Internet rather than on a desktop computer – represents the biggest single challenge to Microsoft.

Cloud computing describes using the Internet to deliver software as a service. Under this model, people can use services “from the cloud” without having to manage the complexity of installing or maintaining the infrastructure that provides them.

Search engines provided the first examples of software as a service, offering an on-demand personalised index of the contents of the Internet.

Google has taken this concept further than anyone else by delivering a broad range of online applications as a simple, advertiser-funded service to consumers. For example, Google Map just rocks, even with its peeping Tom Street View feature.

Check it out yourself at Google Apps –http://www.google.com/apps/ - which give you access some great online applications for free.

Last week, Google released a beta version of its own browser, called Chrome, which you can download from www.google.com/chrome. Along with Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari, Chrome will further chip away at the market dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The promised benefits of Chrome include a single query area in the address bar that provides suggestions for both search results and web pages.

As well as fleet performance and thumbnails of your favourite sites, Chrome offers shortcuts to your web applications, making it as central control panel online.

Typically unconventional, Google gave us a present for its birthday.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. You can view his website at www.johnharris.net.au .

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