Believe it or not, the world’s most powerful search engine started in a garage. Classic, right? People often ask about the year Google was founded because they want to pinpoint the exact moment the internet changed forever. It was 1998. Specifically, September 4, 1998. But if you’re looking for a simple date, you’re missing the actual drama of how Larry Page and Sergey Brin almost sold the whole thing for a million bucks and went back to their PhDs.
They were just Stanford students. Two guys in cargo shorts messing around with an algorithm they called BackRub. Honestly, that name was terrible. They eventually landed on "Google," a play on the mathematical term "googol," which represents a 1 followed by 100 zeros. They wanted to organize an infinite amount of information.
The 1998 Reality Check
The year Google was founded wasn't just about a legal filing in California. It was the culmination of two years of research. By the time 1998 rolled around, the duo had already been crawling the web from Stanford’s servers for a while. They were actually hogging so much bandwidth that the university IT department was getting pretty annoyed.
In August of '98, Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote them a check for $100,000. He hadn't even seen a full business plan. He just saw the demo, realized it worked better than AltaVista or Yahoo, and wrote the check to "Google Inc." The problem? Google Inc. didn't legally exist yet. Larry and Sergey had to hurry up and incorporate just so they could cash the check. That’s why the official anniversary is September.
✨ Don't miss: Is Someone Going to Buy TikTok? The Messy Reality Behind the Headlines
Why 1998 Was a Weird Time for Tech
Context matters. In 1998, we were all using dial-up modems that made that screeching noise. Most people "surfed" the web by clicking through directories. Yahoo was the king back then, but it wasn't a search engine; it was a manually curated list of links. If a website wasn't in their directory, you basically couldn't find it.
Google changed the game by using PageRank. This algorithm didn't just look for keywords. It looked at who was linking to whom. It treated a link like a vote of confidence. The more "important" sites that linked to you, the higher you ranked. It sounds obvious now, but in the year Google was founded, it was revolutionary. It moved us from a web of curated lists to a web of indexed data.
The Garage and the Growing Pains
Susan Wojcicki—who later became the CEO of YouTube—rented her garage in Menlo Park to the boys for $1,700 a month. She needed the mortgage money. They needed a place that wasn't a dorm room.
💡 You might also like: How to Reset a Fire TV Stick Without Losing Your Mind
It wasn't glamorous.
They had messy desks, bulky CRT monitors, and a ping-pong table. By December 1998, PC Magazine named Google one of the Top 100 Web Sites, noting that it had an "uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results." This was high praise back when most search engines returned hot garbage half the time.
The Almost-Sale of the Century
One of the wildest parts of the Google story is that it almost ended in 1999, just a year after the year Google was founded. Brin and Page approached George Bell, the CEO of Excite. They wanted to sell Google for $1 million. Bell passed. They even lowered the price to $750,000. He still said no.
Think about that.
The company is now worth trillions. If that deal had gone through, Google might have been absorbed into a failing portal and disappeared entirely. Instead, they stayed independent, moved to an office in Palo Alto, and started the journey toward the "Googleplex."
Common Misconceptions About the Start
Lots of people think Google was the first search engine. It wasn't. Not even close. Lycos, Magellan, and even Ask Jeeves were already things. Google was just the first one that felt like it "knew" what you wanted.
Another myth? That they had a master plan for world domination. In reality, they didn't even have a way to make money at first. The "AdWords" system didn't launch until 2000. For the first couple of years, they were just burning through investor cash and trying to keep the servers from melting.
How to Use This History Today
Understanding the year Google was founded gives you a leg up on how the web actually functions. It teaches us that relevance beats volume every single time. If you're a business owner or a creator, don't just dump content into the void. Build authority. Get links from people who matter.
Take these steps to align with how Google has evolved since '98:
- Audit your "votes": Look at who is linking to your site. Are they reputable? Google still uses a version of the PageRank logic from 1998. One link from a high-authority site is worth more than 1,000 links from random blogs.
- Focus on Intent, Not Keywords: In the early days, you could trick search engines by repeating a word 50 times. That died a long time ago. Write for humans, because Google’s AI is now smart enough to know if you're being helpful or just thirsty for clicks.
- Speed is King: Back in '98, Google's homepage was sparse because the founders didn't know much HTML and wanted it to load fast. That philosophy hasn't changed. If your site takes more than three seconds to load, you’re losing half your audience.
- Check the Wayback Machine: Go look at Google’s 1998 interface. It’s a reminder that your first version doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be useful.
The story of 1998 is a story of a better algorithm winning the day. It’s a reminder that the internet isn't static. It’s constantly being re-indexed and re-evaluated. Staying relevant means understanding that the core mission—organizing the world's information—is still the same one Larry and Sergey had in that Menlo Park garage.