Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Photo by Joi Ito
On Sept. 4, 1998, two Stanford Ph.D. students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, formally incorporated a small startup they called Google in Menlo Park, Calif. The milestone marked the transformation of a university research project into what would become one of the world’s most influential technology companies.
Google’s origins trace back to 1996, when Page and Brin collaborated on a search engine prototype they named BackRub. It was built to analyze the structure of the web using a new algorithm called PageRank.
Their early work attracted attention within Stanford’s computer science community, but the turning point came in August 1998, when Sun Microsystems co‑founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check made out to Google Inc., a company that technically did not yet exist.
The name Google was inspired by the mathematical term “googol,” representing the number 1 followed by 100 zeros — a nod to Brin and Page’s mission to organize vast amounts of information online.
Google’s first office after incorporation was a rented garage belonging to Susan Wojcicki, who became one of Google’s earliest employees and later served as CEO of YouTube. From this modest space, the team continued refining the search engine, which quickly gained traction for its clean interface and highly relevant results.
Within its first year, Google grew from handling about 10,000 searches a day in September 1998 to 3.5 million a day by September 1999, attracting interest from Silicon Valley investors and setting the stage for rapid growth.
The company’s incorporation 28 years ago marked the start of a technological shift that would redefine how the world accesses information.