How did Google become the powerhouse that it is today? Although it's hard to remember a time when Google wasn't the most popular search engine in the world or a time when Google wasn't the company behind many of the websites and tools that people use every day (like YouTube and Gmail), Google's enormous success didn't happen overnight.Google launched in 1998 with a $100,000 investment from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. As the infographic shown below from Promodo tells us, one year later, Excite (a more popular search engine at the time) turned down an opportunity to purchase Google for just $750,000. Just five years later, Google would raise more than $1.6 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) bringing the market capitalization of Google to more than $23 billion.The infographic below shows a variety of interesting facts and statistics about Google's growth. Some highlights from the infographic (and some additional interesting facts from the Google corporate website) include:

• Google processes 20 petabytes of information per day (compare that to the 50 petabytes of all of the written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history in all languages).
• It would take 95,116 years to do a manual search of Google's 50 billion web pages at one minute per page.
• Each day, Google receives 620,000,000 visitors.
• The Google home page is available in 88 languages.
• Google has indexed 50 billion web pages since 2008.
• Google's 2012 annual revenue was $50 billion, which is greater than the $45 billion combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the 43 poorest countries in the world.
• Google employs 53,891 people.
• Google has 83 offices around the world.
• Consumers have spent more than $23.6 billion through Google shopping.
• Google has acquired 127 companies in 12 years.
• Google AdWords launched in 2000.
• Gmail launched in 2004.
• Google went public in 2004.
• Google Maps and Google Earth launched in 2005.
• Google acquired YouTube in 2006.
• Google launched Android in 2007.
• Google Chrome launched in 2008.
• Google+ launched in 2011.

You can view the complete infographic below.

Designed by PromodoWhether or not you like Google, it's highly likely that you use at least one Google product. In short, Google's impact on the digital publishing industry (which also affected the offline publishing industry) has been felt around the world. And it's not over yet.Image: Robert Scoble