 TIMELINE April 1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin present their seminal paper "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" at the 7th International Conference on the World Wide Web in Brisbane, Australia. They publicly demonstrate a search engine they call "Google". August 2002: Kate Vale is hired as the first employee of Google in Australia - the second office after Japan in APAC. She sells AdWords from her lounge room before starting a local office and hiring a sales team. Our first local AdWords client is eBay Australia. December 2002: Google.com.au launched. June 2004: Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma - four Australian engineers who have invented a mapping application that becomes Google Maps - join Google and become the first Google engineers in Australia. The local engineering team starts to grow. January 2006: Google Australia opens a sales office in Melbourne. May 2006: Google opens its new Australian headquarters in Sydney. July 2006: Richard Kimber is hired as Regional Managing Director, South Asia, based in Sydney. A new period of employee growth begins. October 2006: Google hires its first employee in New Zealand. January 2007: Maps.google.com.au is launched. Within 11 months, it becomes the Number 1 online mapping site in Australia. February 2007: Alan Noble is appointed Head of Engineering for Google Australia, sparking rapid growth in the local Engineering team. May - October 2007: Google enters landmark partnerships with Australia's two largest publishers, Fairfax Media and News Digital Media. September 2007: Google Australia unveils Google's first dedicated election page at Google.com.au/election2007, for the upcoming Australian federal election. October 2007: YouTube.com.au and YouTube.co.nz are launched. November 2007: Google announces the hiring of General Manager for Australia and NZ, Karim Temsamani, heralding the next phase of growth for the local team. 26 January 2008: The home page logo on Google.com.au is replaced on Australia Day by a doodle by Janelle San Juan, a 12 year old student from Melbourne, the winner of the Doodle 4 Google competition. |