Thirteen years ago this month, a behemoth was born. Arguably the most influential online brand ever, Google was the brainchild of young Stanford graduates Sergey Brin and Larry Page and grew from an earlier search engine project – the slightly creepily named BackRub, which the two had founded in 1996. One year later, the pair registered the Google.com domain name before being incorporated as Google, Inc. in September 1998 in order to cash a $100,000 cheque from their first investor, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Andy Becholsteim.

The past thirteen years have seen consistent year-on-year innovation, an appropriate record for a company so ambitiously named – Google is a corruption of the word “googol“, meaning the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. From humble beginnings with one employee in a Mento Park garage and a soon to be shed exclamation mark at the end of their name, Google’s progression was astonishing.

1999 saw the addition of “Uncle Sam” to the Google roster – a specialised landing page for searching millions of US government documents. The Uncle Sam function was a vertical search allowing users to search a limited index of the web – a need which Google deemed irrelevant with the improvements to their mainline search functionality. The service was dropped in June, along with the specialised Linux and Microsoft searches.

Google became the world’s premier search engine at the turn of the millenium. 2000 was the year that Google went into partnership with Yahoo! and broke the 1 billion mark in URLs indexed, more than any other engine. The company also launched AdWords as a new way of generating revenue – a service allowing people to purchase keyword advertising that would appear alongside search results.

Another year, another breakthrough. 2001 saw the launch of Google Image Search, with an index of 250 million images.

Early in 2002, Google spread their wings into hardware for the first time. The Google Search Appliance allowed purchasers to plug the Google technology into private networks. “It was just a natural extension for us to take our existing search product and put it behind the firewall,” said Joan Braddi, vice president of search services at Google. “We had been asked by many of (our) partners for something like that.” The technology could hold up to 150,000 documents, or 10 gigabytes of data, and cost $20,000.

With a continuing emphasis on creating revenue, Google used 2003 to launch what was to become AdSense after Google acquired Applied Semantics. 2003 was also the year that Google acquired Pyra Labs, creators of the Blogger technology.

2004 was Google’s busiest year yet, as they launched gmail on April Fool’s Day, having already thrown Orkut into the social networking mix in January of that year. Later in the year, Google’s initial public offering saw 19,605,052 shares put on sale at $85 each.

Google continued to create at a feverish pace in 2005, with the launch of Google Maps in February, followed by developer resource code.google.com, Google Analytics, Google Earth and Reader.

YouTube was a groundbreaking organisation in its own right, so when Google purchased the company for $1.65 billion they formed a formidable combination. In 2006, Google also developed more of its own products – GChat, Trends and Google Checkout.

2007‘s major development was Google’s announcement of its step into mobile with the launch of Android – “the first open platform for mobile devices.”

Google took a year to release its first Android powered phone in partnership with T-Mobile, the G1. 2008 also saw Google create its own open source browser to compete with Firefox – Google Chrome. It was also the year in which Google added the Suggest function to its search.

2009 saw one of Google’s few failures. Google Wave was an attempt to move into real-time communications, combining aspects of e-mail, instant messaging, social networking and project management in one platform. Unfortunately, just more than a year later, the Wave had broken and rolled back as its uptake failed to match the initial buzz.

Last year, the company gave us the Google Apps Marketplace, an app store allowing third-party developers to market their creations. 2010 was also the year in which Google Buzz picked up where Wave had left off as a social sharing utility, this time grounded in Gmail.

Which brings us to 2011 and the launch of Google + in June. Now a bona fide tech giant, Google showed its financial clout by purchasing Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

Google’s future, however, is less clear. The now teenaged company faces fierce competition from even younger organisations, first and foremost amongst them Facebook. This infographic from MBA Programs Info shows how the two companies match up. Google’s user base is still far bigger, but users are relying more and more upon Facebook – if the average internet user were to be online for 24 hours, they would spend 2 hours and 18 minutes on Facebook whilst only spending 1 hour 45 minutes on Google. Perhaps more pertinently, though, Facebook’s ad revenue outstripped Google’s in 2011 by over $1bn.

So what next for Google? Would you trust Facebook as a search utility as well as a social network? Or can Google + become the new social networking monolith?