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
Andrew Gonzales
Its amazing that something we used on a regular basis started as something so small. While slowly becoming one of the biggest companies ever imagined. To think without the funding and the belief people had in the company what might of happened. The story of Google is amazing and one that shaped how we are today.
Maya Mani
I never knew that Google started out as a research project at a profound university. It’s interesting because Mark Zuckerberg had a similar success story with Facebook. I don’t know what we’ll be able to create in the future, but so much can be done in the time we have now in university. We’re so lucky to be living in a time where knowledge is so accessible and instantaneous.
Antonio Coffee
It seems strange to imagine a world without Google and how that world would work. I am grateful that these men were able to create such an amazing search engine. It has helped me find out a lot of information throughout the years. It is amazing to think that the idea came out of an earlier project to create a web crawler.
Yazmin Garza
Every day from now on, I will thank god for that research project that birthed the beginnings of Google, because I use Google every day, multiple times a day. I would not know what to do without it. I do find it funny, though, that Larry and Sergey caused the internet to crash in their Stanford dorms. Imagine trying to do a research paper and not being able to because the two guys next door are making history.
Sharriah Martinez
This was a great article. I use Google on a daily basis, especially for papers, assignments, and research. It is crazy that Two men, Larry and Sergey, made the internet what it is today. It’s interesting to think that this all began because they needed to complete a research paper that enhanced digital libraries. I have taught many of my elder family members how to use this research engine. I do not know how different my life would be if there was not google.
Mariah Garcia
I am amazed to hear the history of how Google was founded. It never came to my attention to wonder how Google started since it has been a tremendous help for everyone. Two men, Larry and Sergey, redefined the internet today. It’s interesting to think that this all began because they needed to complete a research paper that enhanced digital libraries. I couldn’t imagine how much dedication and work Larry and Sergey put into the company, but it was all worth it in the end. I just wonder how they went from BackRub to Google, what sparked their interest to use the word Google?
Noah Bolhuis
It is crazy that Google started off like every business and website, but fortunately for these two, they created it at the right place in the right time. Every business obviously starts off small but hope to grow. Google just happened to take off as the world’s largest, most recognizable and most used business in the world. Two graduates from Stanford made a business into a near monopoly in little over 20 years, and that blows my mind.
Damian Jennings
I couldn’t imagine a world without instantaneous information available to us, but I guess that is what separates millennial from everyone else. The success of this company has grown to an enormous amount since its release, they have also gained a huge and positive reputation for being so widespread an universal.
Luke Lopez
This was a very interesting article on the rise of Google, and how it quickly affected the lives of people worldwide. It is amazing how an idea, such as Google, was able to gain success so quickly considering Sergey Brin and Larry Page were graduate students at Stanford University. Overall, this was a great article that detailed the success that Google has had over the years.
Eric Ortega Rodriguez
This was an extremely fascinating article. There is no doubt that Google is used a tremendous amount, especially among college students. However, not many know Google’s background or how it came to be and that is why I think is article is fascinating and original. It is interesting to read that Google started off in a garage and that it was created by two computer science graduate students working on a research project. Overall, this was a very well written article, I learned a lot from the company which has served millions of individuals in school, work, and in life.