Ask anyone "when did Google begin" and you'll probably get three different answers. Some people point to the day the domain was registered. Others swear by the date the company actually incorporated in a messy garage in Menlo Park. Even Google itself seems a little confused, having celebrated its birthday on at least four different dates over the last two decades.
It’s weird.
The truth is that Google didn't just "start" on a random Tuesday. It was a slow-motion collision of academic brilliance, serendipitous meetings at Stanford, and a massive amount of credit card debt. Most people think Larry Page and Sergey Brin were best friends from the jump. They weren't. When they first met in 1995, they reportedly found each other obnoxious. Larry was showing Sergey around campus, and they argued about pretty much everything. But that friction—that specific, intellectual grinding of gears—is exactly why Google exists today.
The 1996 Backrub Era
If you want to get technical about when did Google begin, you have to look at January 1996. Back then, it wasn't even called Google. It was "Backrub."
Terrible name, right?
Larry Page was a PhD student at Stanford looking for a dissertation theme. He became obsessed with the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. He treated the entire internet like a giant graph. He realized that a link from one page to another wasn't just a navigation tool; it was a vote of confidence. This became the foundation for PageRank. Sergey Brin, who was already a math prodigy at the university, joined the project soon after.
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They ran Backrub on Stanford’s servers for more than a year. It eventually took up too much bandwidth, and the university IT department started getting twitchy. By 1997, they realized they needed a name that reflected their mission to organize an "infinite" amount of data. They settled on a play on the word "googol," which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Interestingly, the domain https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. If you’re a purist, that’s a strong candidate for the "beginning." But the company as a legal entity didn't exist yet. They were still just two guys in a dorm room with a bunch of borrowed hard drives housed in a casing made of Lego bricks. Seriously. Legos.
September 1998: The Garage and the Check
Everything changed because of a guy named Andy Bechtolsheim. He was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. Larry and Sergey showed him a quick demo of their search engine on a porch in Palo Alto. Andy saw the potential immediately—or he was just in a hurry—and wrote a check for $100,000 made out to "Google Inc."
There was just one problem. Google Inc. didn't exist.
To cash the check, they had to quickly incorporate. They filed the paperwork in California, and on September 4, 1998, Google officially became a company. This is the date many historians point to when answering when did Google begin.
They set up shop in Susan Wojcicki’s garage. Susan, who later became the CEO of YouTube, charged them $1,700 a month in rent. It wasn't glamorous. They had a blue carpet, a ping-pong table, and a hot tub they never used. They recruited their first employee, Craig Silverstein, a fellow Stanford CS student.
The garage was the crucible. It was where the transition from academic experiment to business happened. By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. Even though it was still in "Beta," users were already claiming it gave better results than established giants like AltaVista or Excite.
The Mystery of the Official Birthday
So, why does Google celebrate its birthday on September 27?
It makes no sense if you look at the timeline. September 4th was the incorporation. September 15th was the domain registration. Even the first "Google Doodle" (celebrating the Burning Man festival) happened in August 1998.
The company actually shifted its birthday around for years. In 2003, they celebrated on September 8th. In 2004, it was September 7th. Since 2006, they’ve stuck with September 27th. Why? Because that was the date they had a public spat with a rival search engine (Yahoo) about their index size. Google wanted to announce they had grown their index significantly, and the date just... stuck.
It’s a reminder that even the most data-driven company in the world is susceptible to the chaos of branding and PR.
Beyond the Search Bar: How It Scaled
By 1999, the garage was too small. They moved to an office in Palo Alto with eight employees. This was the year they almost sold the company. It’s hard to believe now, but Larry and Sergey offered to sell Google to Excite for $1 million. The Excite CEO, George Bell, turned them down. They later lowered the price to $750,000. He still said no.
Talk about a bad day at the office.
That failure to sell was the best thing that ever happened to them. It forced them to figure out a business model. For a long time, they didn't want ads. They thought ads would corrupt the search results. But they needed money to pay for the massive server clusters required to index the exploding web.
In 2000, they launched AdWords with just 350 customers. It was a self-service system. You didn't need a sales rep; you just needed a credit card. This democratized advertising. Small businesses could suddenly compete with global brands. This wasn't just a technological shift; it was an economic earthquake.
Key Milestones in the Early Years
- 2001: Eric Schmidt is hired as "adult supervision" to serve as CEO.
- 2003: They move to the current "Googleplex" in Mountain View.
- 2004: The IPO. Google went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 a share.
- 2004: Gmail launches on April 1st. Everyone thought it was an April Fools' prank because it offered 1GB of storage, which was 500 times more than Hotmail.
Why the Start Date Still Matters
Understanding when did Google begin helps us see the pattern of their innovation. They weren't the first search engine. Not even close. Lycos, Yahoo, and Magellan were already household names.
Google won because they focused on a single, difficult technical problem: relevance. They understood that the web's power wasn't in the content itself, but in the relationship between pages.
The company has evolved into Alphabet Inc., a behemoth that touches everything from self-driving cars (Waymo) to life extension (Calico). But at its core, it’s still the same project Larry Page started in 1996. It's an attempt to organize information.
The nuances of the start date reflect the messiness of creation. You don't just flip a switch and become a trillion-dollar company. You argue with your co-founder at Stanford, you build servers out of Legos, you take a check from a guy on a porch, and you eventually find your way.
Actionable Steps for the Curious
If you want to dig deeper into the history or apply the "Google Method" to your own projects, here is how to navigate the legacy:
- Visit the Stanford Digital Repository: You can actually view the original "Backrub" papers and technical specs. It's a masterclass in how to document a complex idea.
- Use Search Operators: To see the web as it looked near the beginning, use tools like the Wayback Machine (archive.org). Type in "https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com" and set the date to December 1998. It’s a trip.
- Audit Your Own "Garage" Phase: Google’s success came from solving one problem better than anyone else. Identify the one "unsolved" problem in your niche and focus on the math/logic of it, rather than the polish.
- Read "The Google Story" by David A. Vise: It’s one of the most accurate accounts of the early days, written before the corporate PR machine became as polished as it is today.
- Check the Google Doodle Archive: If you want to see how the company’s identity shifted over time, the Doodle archive shows their cultural commentary dating back to the very first one in 1998.
Google's beginning was a series of overlapping events rather than a single moment in time. Whether you count from the 1996 research, the 1997 domain registration, or the 1998 incorporation, the result is the same: the world changed how it finds truth.