The short answer
Google was officially founded as a company on September 4, 1998. Its founders were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who met while studying at Stanford University in California.
Quick fact: Google started as a research project before it became a company.
Before Google became a company
In the mid-1990s, the internet was growing quickly. People were creating more websites, but finding useful information could be difficult. Early search engines often listed pages based on how many times a search word appeared on them. This did not always show the most helpful results first.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to find a better way to organize information on the web. They began working on a search engine research project at Stanford University in 1996. The project was first called BackRub.
How BackRub worked
BackRub studied the links between webpages. The founders believed that a link from one webpage to another could act like a vote. A page with many links from other important pages might be more useful than a page with few connections.
Their system analyzed these links to help rank search results. This approach helped Google show pages that were likely to be relevant and useful, rather than simply matching words on a page. The ranking method later became known as PageRank, named after Larry Page.
Why the name Google?
The name Google is inspired by the mathematical word “googol.” A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name suited the founders’ goal of organizing an enormous amount of information.
The search engine became known as Google while Page and Brin were developing their project. They registered the Google.com domain in 1997, before officially forming the company the following year.
Google’s first workspace
In 1998, Google began operating as a small startup. One of its early workspaces was a garage in Menlo Park, California. The company had a small team and limited resources, but its search engine was already attracting attention.
Google’s simple homepage looked different from many other websites at the time. It focused on the search box instead of filling the page with news, advertisements, and links. This made it easy for people to understand what to do.
Google grows
As more people used the internet, Google’s search engine became increasingly popular. Its ability to provide useful results quickly helped it stand out. The company continued improving its technology and building new services.
Over time, Google introduced products for email, maps, online video, mobile phones, web browsers, and cloud services. The company also developed the Android operating system, which is used on many smartphones and other devices.
Google today
Google is now part of a larger company called Alphabet