How Did Google Get Started

Google turned 23 this month. As I’m 49, it means a lot that I can’t remember a time when Google wasn’t on our desktops, and I remember a time before the internet existed. Googles’ Ap Store, Google Search Engine, Google Play, Google Servers, or just Google the company. Google has become a modern-day tech giant and a part of our culture.

Google LLC is an American tech company that’s multinational and specializes in internet-based services and products. Their products include online advertising tech, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Founded on September 4th of 1998 by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders were students at Stanford University in California. They own about 15% of the company’s traded shares and control 56% of the voting power through the super-voting stock. Google first went public through an initial public offering in 2004. By 2015 it was reorganized and became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

Google really started in January of 1996 as a research project by its’ founders while they were PhD students. It initially included an unofficial third founder. The original lead programmer, Scott Hassan, wrote much of the code for the first generation of the Google Search engine. Hassan left before the company was founded, going on to pursue a dream job in robotics.

Originally the new search engine was called BackRub because the system looked for backlinks to estimate the importance of a website. Going on to become PageRank, the system was influenced by the original algorithm used by Rank Dex. Eventually, Page and Brin, changed the name to google which was really a play on words as they looked at “googol”, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was used to signify that they intended for the search engine to provide large quantities of information.

It was a great idea but the initial funding had to come from somewhere and in August of 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote Brin and Page a check for $100,000.00. After some other small investments were secured by Brin and Page, a new round of funding was started with a target goal of $25million dollars. Major investors included venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. So, while Brin and Page may have been a driving force behind Google and the ease of use we experience today, without their investors, we might still be using Yahoo or have been left with Bing.

Brin and Pages' strategies worked well, and after more development, the Google search engine became one of the hottest commodities of the late 90s era tech bubble. Bechtolsheim's check for 100k was made out to Google Inc, even though it didn't exist as a legal entity, yet. The step after that didn't take them long, as they incorporated on September 4th, 1998. It also gave them the ability to raise $900,000.00 more for their initial round of funding. Another investor appeared to them in the form of one Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Sufficiently funded, Google opened its first set of doors in Menlo Park California. A beta version of the search engine was launched, answering 10,000 search queries per day. Google officially removed the beta from its' name on September 21st, 1999.

Google would see a period of rapid growth. During this time, the company introduced several new products. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Voice, and the browser, Google Chrome were among those new products. It also bought Blogger.com and YouTube. Since then, Google has had forays into different businesses. Nexus smartphones, Androids’ mobile OS, Google Home, Google Fi Broadband, Chromebooks, and gaming are a few. We shouldn’t forget to mention the smart, self-driving cars they’re developing.

Bellis, Mary. “The History of Google and How It Was Invented.” ThoughtCo, Jan. 26, 2021, thoughtco.com/who-invented-google-1991852.