It is hard to believe that back in the day there was no Google. Today it is second nature to just “Google” whatever you need to know, from learning to tie a tie, to watching season two of Stranger Things, to getting your degree online. We take for granted the immense power, reliability, and precision of our “favorite” search engine, and not many people know the full story of the creation of Google. Buckle down and get ready for the story you never knew.
The story of Google begins at Stanford University in California, where two young Computer Science graduate students were working on a research project in 1996 for the Stanford Digital Library Technologies. Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the initial Co-Founders of Google) were working on a way to make digital libraries work better and more efficiently. Before there were search engines on the internet, early internet users used a “web crawler” to index books and to analyze the connections between them. The “web crawler” that Larry and Sergey created would use information from books to give relevance and usefulness by the quality and number of citations from the books.1 This would be a precursor for the ideas behind the platform we know as Google search.
When Larry and Sergey were working on their “web crawler,” they decided to create an algorithm known as PageRank. This is what makes Google Google. It ranks websites by their search engine results.2 They simply took the same concept from their index of books, but instead of just books, the program analyzed websites and their search relevance from the web. Once the two understood what they had created, they quickly started working on BackRub, the first company name before picking the name we all know, Google.3 Larry and Sergey released the first ever version of Google on the Stanford Website in August 1996 as a beta test. Soon after releasing their beta test, they were astonished by the success of Google. As a result of this, the two needed a place to set up an office and their equipment. So Larry and Sergey decided to use their dorm rooms as there central hub for all of their work. Since the BackRub crawler utilized much of Stanford’s network bandwidth, which was a blessing and a curse, the internet at Stanford would regularly crash and go down for periods of time. But thankfully, no one at Stanford gave the two any trouble, since everyone was impressed with what Larry and Sergey were doing at Stanford. Once Google started getting bigger, Larry and Sergey needed a new place to start, so they asked their friend Susan Wojcicki, also a graduate at Stanford University, if they could rent out her garage.
On September 7, 1998, Google was established. It initially was able to deliver over 10,000 web searches, which gained the reputation for being the most reliable source of information on the internet. By mid-1998, Larry and Sergey started receiving financing from one of the most well-known co-founders in Silicon Valley, Andy Bechtolsheim, from Sun Microsystems Inc. As a result of Bechtolsheim’s investment, Google started raising over $1 million from other investors, family, and friends. A year later, in 1999, Google was searching over 500,000 web searches a day. That same year, Google received $25 million from rounds of venture capitalists because of Google’s tremendous search results. And by 2000, because of Google’s search engine power, they became the client search engine for Yahoo, although by 2004 Yahoo terminated its contract with Google. As a result of Google’s rapid growth, many internal management problems started to occur. Larry and Sergey knew they needed someone with a vast amount of knowledge on running a business, and they needed an experienced manager. So they decided to hire Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Novell, a software and service company. Larry and Sergey both agreed that Eric would be the CEO of Google, while Larry would be the president of products and Sergey the president of technology. These three men brought Google to new heights and significant growth.4 The astonishment doesn’t stop there, as Google currently processes over 40,000 searches every second on average, which translates into over 3.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion per year. Who would have thought that one of the world’s most renounce tech companies would join many others in the cliche of starting in a garage where the probability of creating technological evolution was equal to finding life on Mars. Now their headquarters is a mega office in Mountain View, California.
In a matter of a couple of years, the two Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were able to create the most valued and well-known company of the twenty-first century.5 Over the coming years, Google started innovating what it meant to be a search engine, forming Google Images, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, Android, and so much more. As of 2015, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Alphabet Inc., which is the multinational conglomerate of Google that includes Waymo (self-driving cars), Google Fiber (internet provider), Nest Labs, and many more companies owned by Google but under the umbrella of Alphabet.
- Encyclopædia Britannica, September 2017, s.v. “Google Inc.,” by Mark Hall. ↵
- Nicholas Carlson, “The Untold Story Of Larry Page’s Incredible Comeback,” Business Insider (April 2014). ↵
- The name Google is a play on words from the word “googol” which is 1.0 × 10^100. ↵
- Steven Levy, In the plex: how Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9-11. ↵
- David Vise, “The Google Story,” Strategic Direction 23, no. 10 (April 2007): 192-199. ↵
63 comments
Dhwani Chandi
Incredibly written! I didn’t know that the story behind google was so interesting how google rose from a 0 to 1940 billion net worth company. As I have a minor in Computer science it was good to know about the algorithm PageRank which makes google GOOGLE. I seriously can not imagine my life without GOOGLE and learning about its past story was intriguing.
Maria Luevano
Such an interesting story! the author, Cameron Ramirez, keeping the article fun and light, yet informational. This article made me realize how much society does take Google for granted. I use Google countless times throughout the day, yet I knew zero information on its background and how the company started up. It is interesting how these two Standford students ended up changing the way society functioned and provided us with such a convenient tool for our everyday lives.
Adam Alviar
Honestly I do not know how people lived in a day where every answer wasn’t at their fingertip. I think this is something we take very much for granted in this day and age as we hold such a powerful tool in our hand that can do or know just about anything we tell it to. It is absolutely crazy to see how tow people have given us the opportunity to have almost any source of information at our fingertips while changing, and revolutionizing the world through the development of technology, and what it can do for us.
Sherisa Orozco
After I read the article it was shocking to think how before Google didn’t exist. It was interesting to read how Google changed the way we now use technology and becoming known all over. It was an inspirational story to read about and see the process of the biggest company come to be. Well organized article and a great article to read.
Carlos Cortes
It’s crazy to imagine that something that we use almost everyday for everything was a senior project. Something that was able to not only change the way that we find information but the way that it changed humanity and united us all through the internet. However, this is also an example that innovation can start anywhere and with determination and hard work your own creations and projects can change the world.
Janie Cheverie
I found it very interesting that Google began as just a research project at a university and has become a resource that is used by millions of people every day. The creation of Google has completely changed the way we operate and rely on technology. It has become such a successful company from being started in a garage which is so inspiring.
Cynthia Perez
Google was a brilliant idea worth almost everything put into making it. Its solved an infinite number of problems and has helped so many people in today’s world. The PageRank algorithm itself is very clever in which it’s able to categorize search results. This tool is super useful when it comes to making people’s searches much faster and much easier. Great article over the creation of a wonderful technological advancement.
Cristianna Tovar
Google is something that we use every day, and it’s hard to imagine what our lives would be like without it. With many advancements in technology, we have learned to rely on Google for anything we could possibly need. I find it incredibly inspirational that Google, such as other major companies such as Apple, started from the bottom up. In the beginning, it was just two college students working in their friend’s garage. Now, Google is an immensely successful company that we use on a daily basis. Great article!
Marco Monte de Oca
Google is just another big company that started out of nothing, in this case, in the dorm room of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I can not imagine our world without Google, we have become so accustomed to using Google everyday. The creation of Google has to be one of the most life changing creations of all time. If we ever need to know something, we can just Google it and we find the answer in a matter of seconds, truly outstanding.
Octaviano Ibarra
I find it so amazing how so many big brands and companies begin their careers or inventions in a dorm, friend’s house, or a garage. I also found it very interesting how the original name wasn’t Google but named Back Rub. I really have contemplated how we practically have all known information right in the palm of our hand and all it takes is simply typing your question or even asking by voice command.