During the 90s, the internet was still being developed. Not everybody had access to it, and the search engines were, let us just say, bad. They often showed irrelevant information, and any website with a little bit of coding could appear at the top, whether it was useful or not. People were annoyed, but this was what they had to work with.
At Stanford University, two students thought that search engines needed a real change. Larry Page and Sergey Brin noticed that the internet was growing fast, but nobody was taking advantage of its structure. So they decided that they would.
They had one simple idea in mind. Search engines should show relevant information, not pages that manipulated their way to the top. That idea became the heart of Google. A search engine built to show helpful results, not the loudest ones.
Larry Page was working on his PhD and needed a topic for his doctoral thesis. He became interested in the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. His advisor encouraged him to pursue this topic, and Larry Page shared his ideas with Scott Hassan. Scott Hassan began writing the code that brought those ideas to life, though he left before Google became a real company.
Their research project was called Backrub, and Sergey Brin soon joined it. Backrub was different from the other search engines because it ranked pages based on backlinks, both the number and quality of them. According to this relevance, the most valuable pages would show up first when someone searched.
The first version of Backrub ran on the Stanford servers, and it took up almost half of the university’s network bandwidth. Larry Page even mentioned that the entire system ran on a 28GB database. Today, most people walk around with phones that have far more storage than that. Backrub continued to grow under the Stanford domain. In 1997, they decided to rename the project Google, based on the word Googol, which represented the huge amount of information they hoped to organize. They first used the domain google.stanford.edu, and on September 15th of 1997, the domain google.com was officially registered. The company was formally incorporated in a garage in Menlo Park, California.
In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were actually willing to sell Google to Excite. Google came with an offer of 1 million dollars, and Excite’s investors negotiated it down to 750 thousand dollars. Even then, the CEO of Excite at the time, George Bell, rejected the deal.
Soon after, Google moved into a real office at 165 University Avenue, a building that had also been used by companies like Logitech and Paypal in their early days. As Google gained more users in the 2000s, they introduced ads. The idea was simple. Advertisers paid for each click, and the ads shown were based on relevance, not randomness. This made them valuable to users as well. Through this model, Google started earning serious money. Even today, Google Ads remains one of the companys most profitable businesses.
After that, Google kept releasing more products. They launched Google News. They acquired Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger. In 2004, Google held its IPO, and many people rushed to buy shares while they were still affordable. At that time Google had 172.85 million shares outstanding. By 2005, the company was valued at 52 billion dollars, making it one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Google continued expanding. They launched Gmail, giving everyone fast and free email. They launched Google Maps, which completely changed how we travel to new places. Then they acquired Youtube and Android and built Chrome. Google went from being a search engine with ads to being a company that shaped almost every part of our digital life.
Behind the scenes, they built huge data centers and some of the fastest infrastructure in the world. They even developed powerful self driving technology through a project that became known as Waymo.
So the question is, how did Google become so big when companies like Microsoft already existed? Search engines already existed too. Google was not the first search engine, but they built the best one. They focused on quality and on making search truly useful. And after that, they just kept going, expanding further and further.
That’s it for this blog post! See you all next time.
