The History of Google

In the mid-1990s, two Stanford PhD students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on a search algorithm they called BackRub, which ranked web pages based on how many other pages linked to them. What started as a research project became a company in 1998, when Page and Brin moved into a garage in Menlo Park and registered the name Google, a play on the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The early years were a race to build infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the world's growing hunger for search. Funding came from investors who recognized something different in the pair's product, and the company moved from the garage to proper offices in Mountain View. AdWords launched in 2000, giving businesses a way to buy targeted advertising alongside search results, and this became the financial engine that would power everything else. Eric Schmidt joined as CEO in 2001, adding business discipline alongside the founders' technical vision. Gmail arrived in 2004, the same year Google went public in an unconventional IPO that made its founders billionaires.