Google Founded
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two doctoral students at Stanford University in California. Their search engine ranked web pages by an estimate of their importance rather than just by keyword matches, producing noticeably more useful results than most rivals. Over the following two decades, the company they created became one of the most influential in the world and reshaped how people find information, advertise, and navigate daily life.
The background lies in the explosive growth of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. As the number of pages multiplied, early search tools such as AltaVista, Lycos, and Excite struggled to put the most relevant results first, and many sites were listed in ways that could be easily manipulated. Page and Brin, who met at Stanford around 1995, began collaborating on this problem. Page had been exploring how the links between web pages could be analyzed, drawing on the logic of academic citation: a page linked to by many other respected pages was probably valuable. This idea became PageRank, the algorithm named partly after Page himself.
Their early prototype ran on Stanford's servers under the name BackRub, later renamed Google, a play on the word "googol," the number one followed by one hundred zeros. The name reflected their aim of organizing a vast amount of information. In 1998, after receiving early investment from individuals including Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, they incorporated the company and set up operations in a rented garage in Menlo Park. Exact milestones from that year are sometimes told differently, but incorporation in September is commonly cited.
Google's clean, fast-loading homepage and quality of results won users quickly, largely by word of mouth. The company later found its business model in advertising linked to search queries, notably through the AdWords system launched in 2000. It went public in 2004, and in 2015 was reorganized under a parent company, Alphabet. Products such as Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube (acquired in 2006), Android, and Chrome extended its reach far beyond search.
The legacy of Google is both celebrated and contested. It made vast quantities of information easily accessible and helped make "to google" a common verb. At the same time, its dominance has prompted debates about user privacy, data collection, the concentration of market power, and the influence of search rankings on what people see. Regulators in the United States and Europe have brought antitrust cases against the company. Whatever one's view, the 1998 launch of a university research project marked a turning point in how humanity interacts with the internet.