Google History

Google is now the most dominant search tool on the web, setting the standards that others try to follow and better, as yet unsuccessfully. It was founded in 1998 - relatively late compared to many of the popular search engines - by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were graduate students from Stanford University.

Page and Brin had been working together on a search engine they called "BackRub" since early 1996, but with the encouragement of Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, they decided to start a company in 1998 and went looking for investors to back them. Google, Inc. was established on September 7, 1998. The founders hired Craig Silverstein - who was later to become Director of Technology - as their first employee, and started the business in a friend's garage.

Google was still in an alpha stage, with an index of just 25 million pages, but it was handling 10,000 search queries every day. The search engine and the company grew quickly through word of mouth, initially with regular web users coming across the tool and finding the results to their liking.

Usage spread rapidly through press coverage, awards and recommendations, whilst Google's effectiveness and relevance, its speed and reliability, plus clean visual effects and 'quirky' nature all contributed to a rapid increase in the number of new advocates.