Google: Now We Are 10

Sunday is Google's 10th birthday. There's no need to send a card: You can expect birthday candles or some other appropriate symbol on the Google search page that day.

For September 7, 1998 was the day when Google was incorporated.

Sergey Brin, then 24 years old, and Larry Page, 25, both Stanford students, started the company in a garage in Menlo Park, California, with $1 million in funds and four employees. The company's name was derived from the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros (and certainly not from the cartoon character Barney Google).

Ten years later, Google is a behemoth in search, with $16.6 billion in annual revenue and 19,600 full-time employees.

That rapid growth is simply astounding. Compare Google's first 10 years with how some other Internet giants, and Google rivals, looked when they turned 10:

MICROSOFT

When the software giant reached its 10th birthday in 1985, the Internet was a network connecting universities. There, of course, was no business in search. Selling operating software, Microsoft had annual revenue of $140 million (or $300 million today, when adjusted for inflation) and 800 employees.

YAHOO

Also the creation of Stanford students, Yahoo was founded in 1994 but incorporated in March 1995. Ten years later, it had $3.6 billion in revenue ($4 billion adjusted for inflation) and 7,600 employees.

eBAY

The online auction company was founded in September 1995. It has made a number of acquisitions since, most notably, that of PayPal. In 2005, it had annual revenue of $4.6 billion ($5.2 billion adjusted for inflation) and 8,100 employees, including temporary workers.