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
Samman Tyata
I really liked your article as it is well managed and effectively polished. Well, I consider Google to be an important aspect in every field and I can’t imagine the world without. To know about the PageRank was something new for me. Furthermore, it was interesting to read that a year later, in 1999, Google was searching over 500,000 web searches a day. To sum it up, it was a good and informative read.
Michael Mandujano
This article is very interesting, I have gained a greater understanding on the emergence of the popular search engine Google. The author perfectly gathered accurate information on the development of Google and its creators. I had no idea that two graduate students from Stanford University developed “BackRub” before they later changed it to Google. For two students in college to develop this search engine and completely change the technological industry is very inspiring.
Karina Nanez
What an interesting story to read, I use Google for everything and I had never known it’s origin. How amazing that two Stanford Students created the most well-known and most-reliable search engine on the internet as a research project for a computer science class. Even more amazing to me was how it was run out of a garage for a period of time before receiving incredible amounts of funding and investments.
Sarah Mares
This article was very interesting to read because I did not know how google was created in the first place. The story behind Larry Page and Sergey Brin coming together at Stanford University to formulate the idea behind Google and its many prototypes that came before was fun to read about. It’s pretty cool to know that all their hard work was put towards something that changed the way the world uses the internet to obtain answers of all times. Such a greatly written article and an informative read!
Abigale Carney
It is crazy to hear the stories of some of the most successful companies and how they began or set up. I had no idea that the creators of Google were so young; I find it so interesting. I really like the topic that you chose, I have always wondered about Google because I use it on a daily basis. Loved this article!
Josselyn Arrieta-Meraz
I had not idea that google started out in a dorm room let alone how young the makers were, what surprised me if the Idea. To think that from a small problem you could make a multi-million dollar company really amazes me, their work and contribution really paid off. Google now is a term used i our daily lives as a internet user the number one essential is Google, it is so well known which only makes you imagine the actual amount of success it must have on it’s own.
Cherice Leach
Interesting article. What would we do without Google now right? I didn’t know how late Google was developed. I for sure it was established a couple years before I was born but it’s just as old as I am. For the company being so young and taking off so well is astonishing. Who would of thought a project you and your buddy are working on in a dorm room could turn out to be the most used search engine. Very interesting story, great job.
Joshua Breard
I think everyone is familiar with Google but not everyone necessarily knows the story. It is crazy how it was started out of a college dorm room. Who would have thought that this idea from a college dorm room would turn into a world famous brand. The word “google” is even used as a verb. This proves that anything can be accomplished and if you have a great idea to follow it. Great article!
Benjamin Voy
“Backrub” that really would have been different from google. This was a great article that made interested me from the very beginning. Its amazing how much we use google in our daily lives and I wonder what we would be doing without it. I had no idea the time that went into creating such a useful internet tool but it really paid off. Well written and great article.
Evelin Joseph
As everyone, including me, uses Google on a daily basis for just about anything, this article was truly engaging and enjoyable. It was cool to learn about the origins behind Google and how the world’s “favorite” search engine came to be. I had never before known that they used an algorithm called PageRank to make rank their search results. I also never knew that they considered the name BackRub, which I think would have been pretty funny as we use Google so much. From dorm rooms to garages, the creators of Google started out as everyone else did and gained great success as one of the most well-known companies today.