What is the history of Google?

Google is one of the most recognizable names in the world today and its history is just as impressive. Founded in 1998 by Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google has grown to become a global leader in technology, providing billions of users across the globe with the world’s best search engine, digital advertising platform and many other innovative products and services.

The seeds of Google were planted in 1995 when Page and Brin met at Stanford, where they quickly developed a close friendship and began working together on a research project. Their project, which would later become known as “BackRub”, used the concept of “PageRank” (the mathematical algorithm that measures the relative importance of webpages) to measure the importance of webpages with the aim of providing better search results.

In 1998, Page and Brin decided to register the domain “Google.com”. They had originally considered other options for the name such as “Googol” (which means a 1 followed by a hundred zeros) but settled on “Google” as it sounded more friendly and easy to pronounce.

By the end of 1998, Page and Brin had developed a fully functional search engine that was far superior to any other engine on the market. The rest, as they say, is history. Google quickly became the most popular search engine on the web and in the years since its launch, it has become synonymous with search, becoming the world’s most powerful digital platform and even rebuffing multiple offers from Yahoo to buy the company.

Today, Google is much more than just a search engine. The company has flourished under the leadership of its founders and has diversified its product portfolio to include products and services such as gmail, Google Maps, Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, Chrome, Android and more.

Ultimately, Google’s history serves as a testament to the power of the human imagination and entrepreneurship. Despite the immense challenges the company faced early on, Page and Brin’s tenacity and commitment to excellence and innovation saw them through, eventually resulting in the creation of one of the world’s most successful companies.