Google

Google is todays leader in search engines.

Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford. At the time search engines ranked pages based on how often a keyword appeared on the web page. Larry and close friend Sergey Brin (also a Ph.D. student at Stanford) decided that the relationships between websites would produce better search results.

They were right and Google has revolutionised the way in which search engines work today.

A significant majority of the searches done online are done through Google.

Google has bought and developed many free Google Tools which continue to help maintain it's dominance of the search engine marketing arena.

Google AdWords, it's Pay per Click service, dominates the PPC market and again this leadership came about because of the foresight to break the current model.