When Was Google Founded? History, Founders & Milestones

If you use Google to find anything online, you’ve probably never stopped to wonder when that little search box actually appeared. Most people assume Google has always existed—but it didn’t. The company was incorporated in 1998 by two Stanford PhD students who met at a campus orientation. Here’s the complete story of Google’s founding, from its humble beginnings in a university research project to becoming one of the most influential companies in history.

Founding Year: 1998 · Founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin · Original Name: BackRub · Launch Product: Google Search · Parent Company: Alphabet Inc. (since 2015)

Five key milestones trace Google’s transformation from academic experiment to global corporation.

When was Google made available to the public?

Google launched publicly in 1998 to market its search engine, though the official incorporation required a pivotal moment first. Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a $100,000 check to a company that did not yet exist, prompting Larry Page and Sergey Brin to officially incorporate Google Inc. on September 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, California, according to Google’s official company history.

The first office was not a sleek Silicon Valley campus—it was a garage rented from Susan Wojcicki, who would later become Google’s first marketing manager and eventually a senior executive. Bechtolsheim’s investment arrived in August 1998, giving the Stanford researchers the capital needed to formalize what had been a university research project into a business.

Beta launch details

Before the formal incorporation, BackRub had operated on Stanford’s servers using domains like google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu, according to Wikipedia. The project analyzed web pages based on incoming links to determine relevance—a revolutionary approach that would eventually become the PageRank algorithm.

Official incorporation

Google Inc. was officially incorporated on September 4, 1998, as confirmed by seven independent sources compiled by Upgrow. A minor discrepancy exists: EBSCO Research Starters lists September 7, 1998, as the incorporation date, though the vast majority of sources including Wikipedia and Google itself confirm September 4.

What is Google’s old name?

Google was originally called BackRub—a name that directly described the project’s core innovation. BackRub analyzed web pages based on incoming links to determine relevance, according to Google’s official company story. The project started in 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students at Stanford University.

BackRub origins

BackRub was a research project started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 while they were PhD students at Stanford, according to Wikipedia. By some accounts documented in Google’s official narrative, the two disagreed about nearly everything during their first meeting at a campus orientation in 1995, but by the following year they had formed a partnership.

According to the Internet History Podcast, BackRub launched in March 1996 with web spiders designed to map links across the internet. The project received funding through the Stanford Digital Library Project by the National Science Foundation, as noted on Google Fandom.

Transition to Google

BackRub was renamed Google in 1997—a play on “googol,” the mathematical term representing 1 followed by 100 zeros, per Upgrow. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, according to Wikipedia.

Scott Hassan was the lead programmer who wrote much of the initial BackRub code but left before the official founding, making him an unofficial third founder, Wikipedia notes. Other contributors included Alan Steremberg, though their involvement was informal.

Who owns Google?

Today, Google operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a restructuring that occurred in 2015, according to Britannica. Under this structure, Alphabet serves as the parent company with Google as one of several subsidiaries that also include Waymo, DeepMind, Verily, and others.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin maintain significant control through their Class A and Class B shares, per Britannica’s analysis. The dual-class share structure gives founders disproportionate voting power relative to their financial stake—a common arrangement that allows original creators to maintain strategic direction even after going public.

Current ownership structure

As of the most recent disclosures, Page and Brin collectively held super-voting shares through their Class B holdings. Major institutional shareholders include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street Corporation, though no single investor controls a majority stake.

Alphabet Inc. role

Alphabet Inc. became Google’s parent company on October 2, 2015, creating a corporate structure that separated Google’s core advertising business from experimental ventures. Page served as CEO of Alphabet until stepping down in 2019; Brin held the position of President.

What if I invested $1000 in Google in 2004?

Google went public via IPO on August 19, 2004, on NASDAQ under the ticker GOOGL, according to Wikipedia. The initial public offering price was $85 per share, and those who invested $1,000 would have received approximately 11.76 shares before any splits.

Post-IPO, Google implemented two stock splits: a 2-for-1 split in 2014 and another 2-for-1 split in 2022. Adjusted for these splits, the original $85 IPO price translates to approximately $10.63 pre-split equivalent per share in today’s trading range.

IPO details

The 2004 IPO raised approximately $1.67 billion in capital, valuing the company at roughly $23 billion at the offering price, according to EBSCO. Google was one of the largest technology IPOs at that time, though the company emphasized that it was not intending to become a conventional company—language that appeared in the prospectus and became part of Google’s corporate identity.

Page and Brin had agreed to work together until 2024 post-IPO, a commitment that provided institutional investors some assurance of continuity, Wikipedia notes.

Return calculations

A $1,000 investment at IPO would have grown to approximately $15,000-$20,000 by 2024 if held through all splits and reinvested dividends. Google shares trade in the $130-$170 range post-split, representing roughly a 1,500-1,700% total return over two decades.

When was BackRub created?

BackRub was created in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. The project began as academic research focused on analyzing the link structure of the web, an approach that would eventually become Google’s core innovation.

Project start at Stanford

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in 1995 at Stanford during orientation, according to Google’s official company story. By the following year, they had begun working on what would become BackRub. The project analyzed backlinks—a metric Page believed indicated a page’s importance—to create a more relevant search ranking system.

“In a sense, the web is this: anyone can annotate anything very easily just by linking to it,” Page later explained, according to the Internet History Podcast. This insight became the foundation of PageRank.

Evolution to Google Search

The PageRank algorithm measured site relevance by link popularity rather than keyword density, according to EBSCO. This approach was revolutionary because it treated links as votes of confidence—a page linked by many other pages was likely more authoritative than one with few links.

By 1997, the technology had evolved beyond a research project into a potential product. The domain google.com was registered in September 1997, and the decision was made to build a company around the technology rather than license it to an existing search engine.

Related reading: Google founding history · company milestones

Frequently asked questions

For readers curious about tech history, the Google founding story illustrates how academic research can become foundational infrastructure. The decision by Page and Brin to incorporate in 1998—not merely to publish their research—created the legal and financial structure necessary to scale an idea that began in a Stanford dorm room.