If you want to understand when Google first started, you have to stop thinking about a massive campus with free snacks and colorful bicycles. It wasn't that. Honestly, it was a mess of tangled cables and borrowed hardware in a cramped room at Stanford.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't even like each other at first. They met in 1995. Sergey was a bit of a cocky second-year grad student assigned to show Larry around the campus. They argued about almost everything. It’s funny how a multi-trillion dollar company began with two guys bickering over urban planning and mathematics.
By 1996, they were collaborating on a search engine they called BackRub. Yeah, you read that right. BackRub. It was a play on the technology’s ability to analyze "backlinks" to determine the importance of a website. It lived on Stanford’s servers for more than a year before it eventually started sucking up way too much bandwidth.
The 1998 Turning Point
Most people point to September 4, 1998, as the official date for when Google first started as a legal entity. That’s the day they filed for incorporation in California. But the "birthday" of Google is a bit of a moving target. They’ve celebrated it on different days over the years, though September 27 has mostly stuck.
Why the name change from BackRub? They wanted something that signaled their mission to organize an infinite amount of information. They landed on "googol"—the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Legend has it they just misspelled it when checking if the domain name was available. https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.
The first office wasn't some sleek glass tower. It was Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. Susan was a friend who eventually became the CEO of YouTube. They paid her $1,700 a month in rent. It’s wild to think the backbone of the modern internet was literally being built next to a parked car and some old storage boxes.
Scrounging for Parts
In those early days, Larry and Sergey were broke. They didn't have fancy servers. They built their own computer towers using LEGO bricks. No, seriously. They used the bricks because they were a cheap, expandable way to house the 10 separate 4GB hard drives they needed to index the web. Total storage? 40 gigabytes. Your phone probably has ten times that much right now.
They weren't even sure they wanted to run a company. They were academics. They tried to sell the technology early on. They went to Excite, a big search player at the time, and offered to sell Google for about $750,000. George Bell, the CEO of Excite, turned them down. Even after they lowered the price, he wasn't interested. That’s arguably the biggest "oops" in the history of Silicon Valley.
How PageRank Changed the Game
Before Google, search engines were pretty terrible. They mostly just looked for how many times a keyword appeared on a page. If you searched for "pizza," the top result was just a page that wrote the word "pizza" a thousand times. It was easy to spam and totally useless for finding actual information.
Larry Page had a better idea. He looked at the way academic papers were cited. If a paper is really important, lots of other researchers cite it. He figured the web worked the same way.
The PageRank algorithm—named after Larry, not the "pages" themselves—treated a link from one site to another as a vote of confidence. Not all votes were equal, though. A link from a high-authority site like the New York Times was worth way more than a link from some random person's personal blog.
The First Google Doodle
One of the most human things about when Google first started was the Burning Man incident. In August 1998, before they were even incorporated, Larry and Sergey headed to the desert for the Burning Man festival.
They wanted to let people know the site might crash while they were gone. They didn't have a PR department or a social media manager. They just stuck a stick-figure drawing behind the second "o" in the Google logo on the homepage. That was the very first Google Doodle. It was basically an "out of the office" reply for the whole company.
Scaling Up and Moving Out
By early 1999, the garage was getting crowded. They had eight employees. They were eating at Burger King. They moved to an office in Palo Alto at 165 University Avenue—a building that also housed PayPal and Logitech at various points. It’s sort of a "lucky" building in tech circles now.
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This was when the world started to notice. PC Magazine named Google one of the top 100 websites and search engines in 1998. The buzz was real. People realized that Google actually gave you what you were looking for on the first try. It felt like magic back then.
They finally moved to their current headquarters, the "Googleplex" in Mountain View, in 2003. But by then, they were already a household name. They had survived the dot-com bubble burst that killed off so many of their rivals. While everyone else was spending millions on Super Bowl ads, Google stayed focused on the search box.
The Weird Business of Not Being Evil
Google's famous "Don't Be Evil" motto wasn't just a PR stunt. It was actually part of their initial public offering (IPO) prospectus in 2004. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, suggested it during a meeting about corporate values.
They were obsessed with keeping search results objective. In the beginning, they refused to sell "placement" in the search results. They wanted users to trust that the top link was truly the best link, not just the one that paid the most. This was a radical idea. It’s eventually what led to AdWords (now Google Ads), which separated the ads into their own clearly marked boxes.
The Legacy of the Stanford Days
Looking back at when Google first started, the most impressive thing isn't the technology. It’s the persistence. They were two students with a weird idea that most big tech companies didn't want to buy. They had to build it themselves because nobody else saw the value in a "clean" search engine.
They didn't start with a business plan. They started with a research project called "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." If you read that paper today, it's amazing how much of it still applies to how the web functions.
The "startup" vibe we all recognize today—the bean bags, the free food, the flat hierarchy—really took root during those early Google years. They wanted a company where engineers were in charge, not MBAs.
Why It Still Matters Today
We take for granted that we can find any piece of information in 0.2 seconds. But before 1998, the internet was a chaotic library with no card catalog and all the books were dumped on the floor.
Understanding the origins of Google helps explain why the internet looks the way it does now. Every SEO strategy, every digital marketing campaign, and every website design is essentially a response to the rules Larry and Sergey wrote in their dorm room.
Real-World Actions for Your Digital Presence
Knowing the history is great, but applying those early principles can actually help your own visibility online today. Google hasn't actually changed its core mission; it just got a lot smarter at executing it.
- Focus on the "Backlink" logic: Google still prioritizes "votes" from other sites. If you want to be seen, stop worrying about keyword stuffing. Instead, create things that people actually want to cite and link to. Authority is earned, not bought.
- Prioritize the User over the Algorithm: Larry Page's original goal was to save users time. If your website is slow, cluttered with ads, or hard to navigate, you’re fighting against Google's fundamental DNA.
- Keep it simple: The original Google homepage was sparse because Larry and Sergey didn't know HTML well and wanted it to load fast. That simplicity became their trademark. Don't overcomplicate your digital interfaces.
- Audit your "E-E-A-T": Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is the modern version of PageRank. Make sure your content clearly shows who wrote it and why they are qualified to talk about the subject.
The story of Google's beginning is a reminder that the best tech usually solves a very simple, very annoying problem. For them, the problem was that search sucked. For you, the goal should be finding the "suck" in your industry and fixing it with that same obsessive focus on the user.
Key Milestones Summary:
- 1995: Larry and Sergey meet at Stanford.
- 1996: BackRub begins crawling the web.
- 1997: https://www.google.com/search?q=Google.com domain is registered.
- 1998: Incorporation and the first garage office.
- 1999: First major round of venture capital funding ($25 million).
- 2004: Google goes public on the stock market.