Quick Answer: Google was officially founded on September 4, 1998, in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford. The project idea started in 1996 as a research search engine called BackRub.
I bet you didn’t know Google once had a name that sounds like a spa menu item. If you’ve ever googled “when was Google created”, you’ve probably noticed the answers don’t always match. There’s a reason, and the backstory is way more fun than tech history has any right to be.
- Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, California.
- In 1996, Page and Brin started BackRub, the Stanford project that later became Google.
- The name comes from “googol”, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- Google went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 a share.
When was Google Created? The Official Date
Google Inc. was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998. Wikipedia lists this as the company’s founding date. An EBSCO history article gives September 7, 1998, instead. Google itself has marked its birthday on September 27 for years. As of September 2026, Google is 28 years old.
How it Started: A Campus Tour at Stanford
The story begins in 1995 at Stanford. Sergey Brin, already a student there, is stuck giving a campus tour to a bunch of possible newcomers, and one of them is a guy from Michigan named Larry Page. Google’s own company history says they disagreed about nearly everything. Still, something clicked, because by the next year they were partners, working out of their dorm rooms.
What was BackRub?
Page needed a thesis topic, and in 1995 he landed on a nerdy idea. What if you treated the entire web as one big graph and tracked how pages point to each other? His adviser, Terry Winograd, told him to pursue it. Page later said it was “the best advice I ever got.”
The trick was backlinks, meaning the links that point to a page. Page compared them to citations in academic papers, where a study that gets cited a lot is probably one worth reading. Hence the name BackRub (I know). Programmer Scott Hassan took Page’s ideas and started writing the code, and Brin jumped on board.
In March 1996, Page’s crawler set off across the web. The pair then built PageRank to turn all those links into a score. Other search engines at the time mostly counted how many times your search word appeared on a page. PageRank cared about who was linking to it instead, and the results were way better.
The first version went live on Stanford’s website in August 1996 and used nearly half the university’s network bandwidth. And the server was in a case made from LEGO-style bricks.
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Why is it called Google?
Because “BackRub” wasn’t going to look great on a T-shirt. The guys swapped it for “Google”, a misspelling of “googol”, the math term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. In their April 1998 research paper, Page and Brin explained the choice:
“We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of ‘googol’ or 10¹⁰⁰ and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”
They planned to search a ridiculous amount of the web. The domain google.com got registered on September 15, 1997, and the mission never really changed: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Where was Google Created? The Menlo Park Garage
Fast forward to 1998. Page and Brin needed money, so Stanford’s David Cheriton set up a meeting with Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. He watched a quick demo and wrote a $100,000 check in August 1998, made out to “Google Inc”. However, there was no Google Inc. yet. So they formed the company, partly so they could cash it.
Their first office was a garage in Menlo Park that belonged to a friend, Susan Wojcicki. She ended up as employee #16 and, much later, CEO of YouTube. Craig Silverstein, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student, was the first hire. More cash came from Ram Shriram and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and between investors, friends, and family, they pulled together about $1 million.
The first Google Doodle appeared that year, a little stick figure telling everyone the team had ditched work for the Burning Man festival. By the end of 1998, Google had indexed around 60 million pages. And then the part that still makes people cringe: in early 1999, the founders tried to sell Google to Excite for $1 million. They even dropped to $750,000. Excite passed.
From Search Engine to Tech Giant: Key Milestones
| Year | What Happened |
| March 1999 | Moves to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto |
| June 7, 1999 | $25 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital |
| 2000 | Text ads launch; Yahoo! deal |
| 2001 | Eric Schmidt becomes CEO |
| Aug. 19, 2004 | IPO on Nasdaq; Gmail launches |
| 2006 | Buys YouTube for $1.65 billion |
| 2008 | Chrome and first Android phone |
| 2015 | Alphabet Inc. is formed; Sundar Pichai becomes Google CEO |
Page and Brin were originally against ads, and their 1998 paper even warned that ad-funded search engines would lean toward advertisers. By 2000, they had made peace with ads, but only for plain text ones. The same year, Google became the default search engine for Yahoo!.
Then came August 19, 2004. Google went public, sold 19,605,052 shares at $85 each, raised $1.67 billion, and was suddenly worth more than $23 billion. Britannica reports the IPO minted seven billionaires and 900 millionaires. Upgrow calls it a significant milestone, which is an understatement. Two years later, “google” was officially a verb in the dictionary.
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Google Today
These days, Google is the biggest part of Alphabet Inc., and Sundar Pichai runs both. Search alone holds about 90% of the global market as of 2025, and the family includes YouTube, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and Gemini. In 2024, a US judge ruled that Google held an illegal search monopoly.
FAQs
When was Google created?
On September 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, California. The BackRub project behind it started at Stanford in 1996.
Who created Google?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Ph.D. students, with early coding help from Scott Hassan.
What was Google’s first name?
BackRub, because it ranked pages by looking at their backlinks.
Where was Google founded?
In Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. It later moved to Mountain View.
How old is Google in 2026?
It turned 28 on September 4, 2026. That’s pretty impressive for a garage startup.
Why was Google created?
To give people better search results by ranking pages on who links to them, not how often a keyword shows up.
