Well as the internet was on the rise, the idea of a search engine became more and more necessary. As it grew, there was no way to keep track of all the information as you needed it. Think of it like this. Take a dictionary, cut out every word (with its definition) individually, and fill a bathtub with it. Now sit in that bathtub. Now let's say you wanted to know the definition of the word autonomous. How on earth would you find it? Well that's what the internet was, except instead of a bathtub, it was an exponentially growing ocean. So if that hypothetical bathtub had google, google would go through and read each definition, and memorize where in the tub it is. So if you were looking for the definition of the word autonomous, google would go, "Oh that's right here." and point you straight to it. So anyways. When the internet was growing, and the need for a quick way to search about it for what you needed grew, a few search engines arose from the mist. There was Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Route 66, Goto, I think there was one that had the word Armadillo in the name, Excite, and many others. Well as time went on, most of the smaller ones died off. They didn't use as efficient algorithms, they didn't load as quickly, they were less reliable, didn't give as good results, etc... Google had an advantage over the others. Google had super geniuses working for them. When Google was first formed, the way they hired was they posted several billboards throughout Southern California with an extremely complicated mathematical riddle on it. You can see a picture of it here (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2004-10-13/google/Billboard_1.jpg) and when you would solve it, it's take you to http://7427466391.com (no longer exists), and on that page there was a congratulations with a second riddle.
f(1)= 7182818284
f(2)= 8182845904
f(3)= 8747135266
f(4)= 7427466391
f(5)= __________
And well, let's just say it went on from there. There were an insane number of levels to this, and each one was more difficult than the last. Well in the end, you got to work for Google. So as time went on, people needed more from their search engines. Yahoo was the first to get on this with the Yahoo image search. Well it sucked, a lot. Yahoo was also first to offer a video search engine, and first to offer email. Their video search sucked a lot too. With time google grew to add these things and more, and having a team of super geniuses working for them, they got it right (Yahoo's fixed theirs since) and thus became even more powerful. At some point Ask Jeeves became just Ask, and Google went from search engine site to full blown corporation. And here we are today. Hope you found all this quite enlightening.