CYBERSPACE—On September 4, 1998, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin legally incorporated a new company headquartered in a friend’s garage and based around a new algorithm they had created in their dorm room—an algorithm that produced the most useful way to search the internet so far created at that time.
They called their new company Google, because their algorithm was able to organize massive amounts of data, and the number “Googol”—a one followed by 100 zeros—represents a quantity greater than the total number of atoms on the universe. Except they somehow made a typographical error, so the name of their company came out spelled “Google.”
It is also interesting to note that when the two students first created the new search algorithm in 1996, their name for it was “BackRub.” Why? Because at that time internet search engines returned results based on how well they matched the keywords in a user search. But “BackRub” instead ranked results based on how often sites were linked from other sites—that is, by “backlinks.”
Two decades after the two students incorporated Google, the company is the dominant force on the internet and one of the largest corporations in the word, with a market capitalization of over $850 million, according to Fortune Magazine.
Google actually has three “anniversary dates,” according to data journalist Felix Richter of the site Statista. In addition to September 4, 1998, the company could trace its beginnings to September 15, 1997, when Page and Brin registered the domain name Google.com—or to September 27, 1998, when the first Google search engine was launched online.
According to Statista, the little company that incorporated in a garage took in $109.7 billion in revenue last year, with a net income of $12.7 billion. Google also controls a massive 90.9 percent of the internet search market, and its Google Chrome internet browser also dominates with a market share just short of 60 percent.
According to a brief history of Google by the Daily Mail newspaper, in 1998 the then-dominant search form Yahoo! made what could easily be considered one of the worst business blunders of all time, when Page and Brin offered to sell Google to Yahoo! for what now seems a paltry $1 million. But Yahoo! took a pass on the opportunity.
A year later, the students tried again to sell out, this time to Excite, a now-defunct internet search engine, but one which in the 1990s was among the most popular search services online. This time the Google founders wanted just $750,000 plus 1 percent of the Excite company. But when Page and Brin insisted that Excite replace its search technology with their Google software, the deal fell apart, according to the Internet History Podcast.
Five years later, in 2004, Google went public, selling shares at $85 apiece, according to the Daily Mail history. Google raised a cool $1.9 billion from the IPO. The friend who loaned Page and Brin her garage for their new company, Susan Wojcicki, became CEO of the Google-owned video site YouTube in 2014.
Photo by Jijithecat / Wikimedia Commons
