Google started because of a chance encounter between two guys who didn't even like each other at first. In 1995, Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school, and Sergey Brin was the guy assigned to show him around campus. They bickered. They argued about everything. But that friction eventually sparked a partnership that changed how you find literally everything on the internet today.
If you’re wondering how was google made, you have to look past the multi-billion dollar campus in Mountain View and go back to a messy room in Gates Hall. It wasn't built to be a business. It was a research project. Larry Page was fascinated by the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. He realized that the links between pages were like citations in academic papers—if a lot of people link to a page, that page is probably important.
He called this idea BackRub. Yeah, really.
From BackRub to PageRank
The name came from the software’s ability to analyze "backlinks" to understand the importance of a site. Most search engines back then, like AltaVista or Excite, just looked for keywords. If you typed "Apple" ten times on a page, those engines thought you were an expert on fruit. It was easy to game and, frankly, the results were usually garbage.
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Page and Brin realized that the web was a giant graph. They developed an algorithm called PageRank. It assigned a numerical weight to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents. Basically, it was a popularity contest where some votes (links) counted more than others. If a high-quality site linked to you, your "rank" went up.
By 1996, BackRub was crawling the web from Page’s dorm room. But the university’s IT department wasn't thrilled. The crawler was a bandwidth hog. It was sucking up Stanford's internet capacity like a vacuum. It’s funny to think about now, but the foundation of the modern internet almost got kicked off campus for being a nuisance.
The Garage and the First Check
By 1997, they needed a better name. "BackRub" wasn't exactly a brand people could get behind. They played around with the word "googol"—the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. They wanted to signify the vast amount of information they were organizing. Legend has it a fellow student misspelled it as "Google" during a domain search, and the name stuck.
They weren't even sure they wanted to run a company. They tried to sell the technology. They went to Yahoo. They went to Excite. They offered to sell Google for about $1 million. George Bell, the CEO of Excite, turned them down. Even after they dropped the price to $750,000, he still said no.
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Talk about a bad day at the office.
Since nobody would buy it, they decided to make a go of it themselves. They incorporated on September 4, 1998. The first real money came from Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He wrote a check for $100,000 to "Google Inc." before the company even legally existed. Larry and Sergey had to keep the check in a drawer for weeks while they scrambled to get the paperwork finished so they could actually deposit the money.
They moved into Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. She was a friend and eventually became the CEO of YouTube. The rent was $1,700 a month. They had a blue carpet, a ping-pong table, and a bunch of servers made from cheap, off-the-shelf parts held together with LEGOs. Seriously, LEGOs.
Why It Actually Worked
It wasn't just the algorithm. It was the philosophy. While every other portal in the late 90s was trying to be a "destination" filled with news, weather, and flashy ads, Google was just a white screen with a box.
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They focused on speed.
They understood that people don't want to hang out on a search engine; they want to find what they need and leave. That radical simplicity was a breath of fresh air. It felt honest. It felt like a tool, not a billboard.
Then came the "Aha!" moment for the business model: AdWords. They realized they could sell ads based on what people were searching for without ruining the user experience. Instead of big, annoying banners, they used text ads that were actually relevant to the search. If you searched for "running shoes," you saw ads for running shoes. It was genius because it wasn't intrusive—it was helpful.
The Scaling Problem
As Google grew, the infrastructure had to keep up. Most companies bought big, expensive mainframes. Google did the opposite. They bought thousands of cheap, "commodity" PCs and wired them together. If one broke, the system didn't care. It just moved the task to another machine.
This distributed computing model is essentially what we now call "The Cloud."
By 2004, Google was a juggernaut. They went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 a share. People thought the "Don't Be Evil" motto was quirky and maybe a bit naive. But that IPO turned Larry, Sergey, and hundreds of early employees into millionaires and billionaires.
Lessons From the Google Story
When you look at how was google made, the takeaways aren't about having a perfect business plan. They didn't have one. They had a better way to solve a specific problem.
- Solve a technical problem first. Revenue models can follow utility, but utility rarely follows a revenue model.
- Scrappiness wins. Using LEGOs for server cases wasn't just about saving money; it was about moving fast and being resourceful.
- Timing is everything. They launched just as the web was exploding and existing search engines were getting bloated and slow.
- Listen to the data. PageRank worked because it relied on the collective intelligence of the web rather than manual curation.
How to Apply This Today
If you're building something, don't wait for "perfect." Page and Brin were running their engine on Stanford's servers until they literally couldn't anymore.
Start by identifying a "signal" in the noise. For them, it was backlinks. For you, it might be a specific customer pain point that everyone else is ignoring because it looks too hard or too technical to solve.
Focus on the core "unit of value." For Google, that was the search result. Everything else—Gmail, Maps, Android—came much later. They mastered the one thing that made them indispensable before they tried to conquer the world.
If you want to dive deeper into the technical side, read the original 1998 paper by Page and Brin titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." It’s surprisingly readable for a computer science paper and lays out exactly how they envisioned the future. Most of what they predicted actually happened. That's the hallmark of a great idea: it looks like a toy at first, but it ends up becoming the foundation for everything else.