The Brains Behind Google: Founders Who Made Us “Search Online”

Google’s story began in 1995 at Stanford University where graduate students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin met for the very first time. From their dorm rooms, they created a search engine called Backrub. Backrub analyzed links between websites to determine their importance on the internet. This innovative approach aimed to make searching the internet more efficient.

The name “Backrub” came from how the system checked backlinks to rank web pages. However, in 1997, Page and Brin decided to rename their project “Google.”

In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to change the name of their project from “Backrub” to “Google.” The name “Google” is inspired by the mathematical term “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeros (e., 1 googol means huge quantity).

They chose this name because it symbolized their mission to organize an enormous amount of information on the internet. The goal was to make all this information easily accessible to everyone around the world..

Google officially became a company in August 1998, thanks to a $100,000 investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. With this funding, Page and Brin moved out of their dorms and set up their first office in a garage in Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki, who would later become the CEO of YouTube.

Google’s search engine quickly stood out from the competition. Before Google, search engines like Archie, Veronica, and AltaVista struggled to deliver relevant results. Google’s breakthrough was its ability to bring the most useful and high-quality pages to the top of search results. This was achieved through constant upgrades to its search algorithms and a commitment to delivering exactly what users needed.

Today, Google’s search index covers hundreds of billions of web pages. Its automated systems, known as Crawling Robots, analyze these pages every day to provide the most up-to-date and relevant search results. Google checks the robots.txt files of billions of hostnames daily, helping to maintain its vast and comprehensive index.

In 2015, Google restructured itself under a new parent company, Alphabet Inc. This change allowed Google to narrow its focus on search and advertising while Alphabet took over other businesses like X Development, Calico, and Verily. This restructuring helped Alphabet become more efficient and innovative, with its Alphabet Inc market value surpassing $2 trillion.

From a small project at Stanford to a global tech leader, Google has transformed how we access information. Its journey is marked by innovation, strategic growth, and a commitment to making the world’s information universally accessible.