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
Anthony Robledo
When i first saw the featured image pop up at the bottom of my screen, i thought it was an ad. Then i read the title and was super interested. It is cool to see how google expanded from something so small to the powerhouse it is today. Life would be so different without google. I can’t even imagine how hardd it would be to find information without it. Sure there are other search engines out there like yahoo and Bing, but they can’t compare to google. Good job and keep uo the good work.
Maria Esquivel
I use Google every single day and never thought about ‘googling’ how Google was created. I was captivated throughout the whole article and found it so interesting how Google came about. How incredible and motivating that two college students turned something small into something huge that people use every single day. I have heard a little about Eric Schmidt but I enjoyed reading how he had a part in making Google even more successful. Great read!
Monica Avila
Like Facebook, Google started out as a small idea from two undiscovered individuals and flourished into one of the most profitable search engines on the internet. It is inspiring to know that this came from just two college students working on a project. It is astounding to know that at one point internet and Google just did not exist. My whole life I have known the internet, and who knows how drastically different it would have been in the absence of it. This article really put that into perspective for me.
Tyler Thompson
Google is one of the most successful companies in the world, and it was cool to read the inspiration to create it. I never knew that it began as a algorithm, and turned into a reliable search engine. Their story is amazing, knowing that anything can happen. This was a very well structured article, and I though that it was very interesting.
Marlene Lozano
The history of Google is amazing, the fact that only two college graduates were able to create this huge company is inspiring. With using Google every day I would not think about how the search engine came to be. It is amazing how far Google has come with owning YouTube and making a self-driving car, the whole company still has a bright future ahead of them.
Anais Del Rio
Not even a few minutes ago I was on Google looking up a question I needed answers for. It’s amazing how technology has come this far to let us gain information at the palm of our hand. It’s amazing how such a giant tech company started from just a dorm and a garage and ambition to what it’s known today. It makes homework much easier now because in the past people had to go to libraries and check out books in order to get the information needed.
Isaac Rodriguez
This article was a great read. I find it inspiring that Google has transformed from a search engine to an innovative tech giant. Its name has become synonymous with the internet. I believe that Google will continue to innovate and take control of the markets they enter, especially with the recent launch of their fast speed internet service Google Fiber.
Robert Rodriguez
Great article about Googles history! Crazy to even think that Google ( one of the greatest companies of our time) started in a dorm room and eventually moved into a garage! from reading the article you can surely tell that “Google” has become a company giant, from changing its name to Alphabet Inc. to introducing itself to the self driving car market is quite the story. The founders of Google have carved the path for success leading us to the Google we love and use just about daily.
Rafael Lopez-Rodriguez
Amazing article on the history of Google. I did not know that Google was founded not so long ago. The power this company has is astonishing. To be honest I do not think most companies that compete with Google can reach to where they have to this day. With the world becoming more technological every day, the power of Google grows and the demand for people to use it as well. Today simply we can not live without Google.
Alexandra Cantu
I can honestly say we all rely on Google a bit too much. And in my opinion it is not a bad thing. Who knows how technology would be without Google? I personally would like to thank Page and Brin for this incredible search engine. They knowledge and commitment is so inspirational. They both were smart enough to hire Eric Schmidt someone with great knowledge to keep Google strong. A great story to see each individual use their strengths. This created the iconic Google that we all know and love.