Google Founded
Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google
September 04, 1998
A Search Engine Built in a Dorm
On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google while they were PhD students at Stanford University. They had been working on a project called "BackRub" — a search engine that ranked web pages based on how many other pages linked to them, on the theory that more links meant more credibility. The name Google came from "googol," the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting their ambition to organize enormous amounts of information.
Why It Beat Everyone Else
In 1998 there were already search engines — AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos. What made Google different was PageRank, the algorithm that measured a page's importance by the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. Results were dramatically better than competitors. Google grew almost entirely by word of mouth. By 2000 it was handling 100 million searches a day. By 2004, when it went public in its IPO, it had become the dominant gateway to the internet.
The Company It Became
Google now processes over 8.5 billion searches per day and owns YouTube, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Maps. Its advertising business generates over $200 billion per year. The word "google" became a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. The company restructured under the parent name Alphabet in 2015. Two former PhD students who almost sold their algorithm to AltaVista for $1 million in 1999 built one of the most valuable companies in history.