19th August marks the 12th year anniversary of Google’s IPO. Your investment results and how Google search has changed over the years.

Google’s initial public offering price was $85. Taking into account Google’s stock split if you had just one share you would now have $1,575. A massive 1752.94% return!

If you had invested $10,000 you would now have $175,384. Nothing wrong with that :)

Obviously some employees made big money. Not sure if this is true, but apparently they were told not to buy BMW’s or they would get their windshields smashed. Very upsetting. If they checked the stock ticker at work they would have to buy the person who caught them 1 share. Hmmm, not as disturbing :)

If you had $100,000 of stock that would be valued at $1,853,022.60 now. That’s a 1753.02% return.

What about the Founders?

At the age of 43 Larry Page has a net worth of $38.7 Billion. He held the CEO position at Google until October 2015.

Sergey Brin has a net worth of $37.9 Billion. He’ll need to save his pennies to catch up to Larry. He runs Alphabet's (Google’s parent company) secretive X division.

How Google search has changed

On November 11th 1998 this was their fancy homepage.

This first link went to their ‘Search Engine Prototype’ page.

This second link went to their ‘Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype’ page.

May 8th 1999

Much more simplified version here.

July 11th 2000

Here they are looking for staff.

August 5th 2001

Not too many changes here.

July 7th 2002

Testing tabs.

June 13th 2003

Time for another tab.

July 7th 2004

No more tabs.

June 23rd 2005

They added ‘Google Local’.

August 20th 2006

This is when ‘Google Video’ was added.

May 17th 2007

Doesn’t look like there’s much happening at Google HQ :)

April 13th 2008

Let’s put the links up top.

July 26th 2009

Comics Themes were added.

July 8th 2010

Search settings were moved up to the top.

June 23rd 2011

Voice Search… where’s that when you need it?

June 13th 2012

Google+ comes on board.

May 18th 2013

It’s getting more popular to use mobile for searching.

June 14th 2014

It’s World Cup time.

June 10th 2016

Pushing Google Chrome.

19th August 2016

Exactly 12 years after the IPO. In support of the Olympics.