It doesn’t take much of a search to spot that this month marks the 20th anniversary of some major milestones in Google history. In early September 1998, Google became an incorporated company, and later that month, the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page moved the soon-to-be tech giant out of their dorms and into the office garage of a friend —current YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
The story of the internet search giant officially starts in 1995, when Brin gave a tour of Stanford to Page, and they got to talking. “We both found each other obnoxious,” Brin once told Wired, adding that there was nevertheless an instant chemistry.
Brin and Page began working on an algorithm that could better sort links in a web search, eventually building the PageRank algorithm. When Brin and Page changed the name of their fledgling association from Backrub to Google in 1996, their search engine drew so much attention on Stanford’s website that it regularly shut down the school’s internet.
By 1998, Google was looking beyond Stanford and were even attracting investors — most notably Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. In 2018, “world’s best search” engine is hardly an adequate or complete description for what Google has become.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
