Google History

The concept behind what would be known as Google was conceived in the January of 1996 as the brainchild of Larry Page and Sergey Brin who at that time were PhD students at Stanford University. The two met while working on their computer science PhDs sometime in the spring of 1995, and despite initial problems seeing eye to eye, they eventually found a common interest in the retrieval of relevant information from large amounts of data. BackRub, as it was known was a mathematical algorithm that determined the importance of a website by analyzing the "back links" pointing to the given website was born.

During Google’s early days as BackRub, it was housed in Larry Page’s dorm room, and was constructed from a network of computers that Page and Brin procured from the school’s loading docks. The new technology’s popularity was beginning to grow in the campus.

By the start of 1998, the search engine had grown to a substantial size, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought more hardware with which they would be able to support further growth. The problem now was that they did not have enough funds to grow the service any further. They decided that they would have to look for investors and put their PhD studies on hold and went about writing a business plan.

Google came into being when Page and Brin visited Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and a friend of a faculty member at Stanford. After a demonstration, Bechtolsheim was interested, but did not have time to go into any in depth discussion regarding the service. He just made them a cheque of $100000 which was made out to Google Inc., which at the time did not exist. This prompted the two to quickly set up the company. Google Inc. officially opened for work on September 7th 1998. It was situated in a friend’s garage, and played office to Page, Brin and Craig Silverstein, who was Google’s first employee. At this time they were already handling 10,000 queries a day, and were starting to receive substantial media attention. In February 1999 they moved to an office on University Avenue in Palo Alto to accommodate the growing number of staff, and eventually to the Googleplex, which is Google's current headquarters in Mountain View, California.