1998
Google Incorporated
On this day in 1998, search engine firm Google, co-founded by
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who met at Stanford University, files for
incorporation in California. Google went on to become the planet’s most-used
search engine, and the word “google” entered the lexicon as a verb meaning to
search the World Wide Web for information about a person or topic. Google eventually
expanded its products and services to include advertising programs, statistical
tools, email, maps, a web browser and a mobile operating system. It has become
one of the world’s largest tech companies.
In 1996, Page and Brin, then in their early 20s and graduate
students in computer science at Stanford, started working on a search engine
for the burgeoning web and called it BackRub. In September of the following
year, they registered the domain name Google.com. The name is play on “googol,”
a term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros; the co-founders thought the
moniker was a good way to symbolize their mission of organizing the vast amount
of data on the web. In August 1998, Page and Brin received $100,000 from an
investor. That same month, prior to leaving for the Burning Man festival in Nevada,
the pair added a small drawing to the Google logo to let people know they’d be
out of the office; thus launching the Google doodle. (Since then, a wide
variety of doodles have appeared on Google homepages to celebrate holidays and
other events.) After Google filed for incorporation in September 1998, its
first office was in a garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the
startup, which by then had eight employees, relocated to an office in the
neighboring city of Palo Alto.
Google opened is first international office, in Tokyo, in 2001.
Three years later, more than 800 Google employees moved to a new corporate
headquarters, dubbed the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. Soon after,
the company launched an email service, Gmail. Also in 2004, Google held an
initial public offering that raised $1.67 billion and valued the company at $23
billion (a decade later, in 2014, Google’s market capitalization was $390
billion). A long string of product roll-outs followed, such as Google Maps and
Google Analytics (a service to measure website performance) in 2005; Google
Calendar and translation service Google Translate in 2006; a mobile operating
system, Android, was announced in 2007 (the first phone built on the system was
released a year later); and a web browser, Google Chrome, in 2008. Google also
acquired a number of businesses, including YouTube, the video-sharing site,
which it snapped up in 2006.
Around 2010, the tech giant established Google X, a secretive
lab dedicated to developing groundbreaking, “moonshot” products such as
self-driving cars and delivery drones. In 2015, Google restructured its
operations—which by then also included a biotech business focused on extending
human lifespan; a maker of Internet-connected devices for the home; and a
high-speed Internet service, among other ventures—into a conglomerate called
Alphabet. At the time, the web search engine that started it all in 1998
continued to dominate the competition, handling more than 3 billion searches a
day.