Netflix vs Google:It may sound like a bizarre fact, but the truth of the matter is that the entertainment giant Netflix which is the main reason for our binge-viewing habit actually came into existence before the tech giant Google that is making our search easier has quite an impact on us. The point we want to deliver here isn’t merely this fact.
Netflix vs Google
When we examine it more closely with the context, history, and insights we see that both these companies that rule the tech world were born within a year from each other and later they changed the digital world in very different ways.
Netflix
Probably the very first thing that comes to mind when one considers Netflix is the series like Stranger Things, The Crown, or that next movie you’re saving for the weekend. But the origin story of Netflix is pretty modest and quite a bit different than you might expect.
Netflix was the brainchild of Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph who came up with the idea in Scotts Valley, California and brought it to life on August 29, 1997. At the beginning, it was not a streaming service at all. It was a DVD rental-by-mail business that customers could use to rent DVDs from the online store and get them delivered to their homes. Later on, Netflix evolved from DVD to streaming and then to original content-making and is now one of the most powerful entertainment platforms in the world.
From Mail-in DVDs to Streaming
Indeed, when Netflix unveiled its website in April 1998, its offerings included approximately 925 DVD titles, and subscribers could check the availability of DVDs and rental them through the internet, which was a completely new concept at that time. This idea was a stepping stone to the creation of a service that would revolutionize worldwide entertainment later on.
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What was happening in the search world while all this was going on? Well, another pair of geniuses was coming up with an idea equally as groundbreaking as the one from Netflix but in a totally different area.
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, decided to start Google. They had been working on their search algorithm since 1996, but the company itself was actually created in September 1998, i.e. about a year after Netflix was established.
From “BackRub” to Google
Page and Brin’s very first search engine was named BackRub; it focused on analyzing the connections between web pages in order to provide the most relevant results possible, which later became the core idea of Google’s PageRank algorithm. After the incorporation, Google rapidly became the main tool of internet users and later it transformed the way people get and interact with information.
Netflix vs Google: Unexpected Timeline
Netflix founded: August 29, 1997 started as a mail-based DVD rental business.
Google founded: September 1998 launched as a new kind of search engine company.
So, just to clarify, Netflix was established approximately one year prior to Google. That’s an interesting fact which may surprise a lot of people who would naturally assume that Google as an Internet company of the utmost necessity was the first one to appear.
