The History of Google

From Garage-based Business to #1 Search Engine

Google, the leading search engine worldwide, was founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergei Brin.

While at Stanford in 1996, Page and Brin began developing a search engine they eventually entitled BackRub. This search engine was designed to look at the connecting links between web pages in order to determine a site's authority. In 1998, Page and Brin set up their first data center in Page's dorm.

With the encouragement of fellow Stanford alum David Filo, who started Yahoo a few years earlier, Page and Brin decided to start a company and started looking for investors to back them. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000 in the company after receiving a demo of their search technology. Eventually the pair raised over $1M.

Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998 in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Page and Brin hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein, who was later to become Google's Director of Technology.

In their humble beginnings, Google served over 10,000 queries a day and quickly gained a reputation as a trustworthy source of information. By 1999, it was serving 500,000 queries a day and the company moved from the unassuming four walls of a garage to the now mega Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google achieved praise and publicity as news spread rapidly through online and offline media as well as their receipt of numerous awards and recommendations. Their audience continued to grow along with their reputation for effectiveness, relevance, speed and reliability.

In 2000, Google replaced Yahoo's own internal search engine as the provider of supplementary search results on Yahoo. Now, with more than 50% share of the total search market, Google provides search results for numerous search engines on the web.

Google has become all-important to both search engines and search engine optimization specialists alike. The other search engines have a tendency to mimic any algorithmic changes made by Google. Likewise, search engine optimization specialists continually study the changes as well in order to provide their clients with the best search engine rankings.

Google is the one to watch.