Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Imagine you’re a college student at one of the best universities in the world, and you have a wild idea. What if you could take every single page on the entire internet — billions and billions of pages — and figure out which ones were actually worth reading?
That’s exactly what two students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to try. And the result changed everything about how all of us find information today.
This is the story of Google.
Larry Page grew up in Michigan, in a house full of computers and science magazines. His dad was a computer science professor. From the time Larry was little, he was taking apart machines to see how they worked. He loved inventing. He once built a working printer out of Lego bricks.
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, and his family moved to America when he was six years old, partly so he could have more freedom to think and learn. He was brilliant at math, the kind of kid who could do complicated calculations in his head just for fun.
Both of them ended up at Stanford University in California — one of the most famous universities in the world for computer science — in the mid-1990s. And that’s where their story really begins.
Now, here’s something to understand about the internet back then. It existed, but it was a mess. There were millions of websites, and nobody had figured out a good way to find what you were looking for. The search engines that existed were pretty bad. If you searched for, say, “dogs,” you might get a million results with no good way to tell which ones were actually useful.
Larry had an idea. What if you could rank websites based on how many other websites linked to them? Think about it this way: if a hundred smart people all recommend the same book, it’s probably a better book than one nobody ever mentions. Larry thought the same thing would work for websites. A page that lots of other pages pointed to was probably more important and trustworthy.
He called his early system BackRub — because it analyzed the “back links” pointing to any given page.
Sergey joined the project, and together they built something really clever. Their system, which they called PageRank — a play on Larry’s last name and the idea of ranking pages — actually worked. It returned much better search results than anything else out there.
They were so focused on their research that they almost ran out of disk space. Larry actually built custom hard drive holders out of Legos — yes, Legos again — to pack more storage cheaply into their Stanford dorm room.
Their search engine started as a Stanford research project, running on the university’s computers. But it kept getting more and more popular. Students were using it instead of the other search engines. Word spread.
Now they needed a real name. Larry and Sergey wanted a name that captured the idea of organizing an almost unimaginably huge amount of information. They settled on a math term: “googol.” A googol is the number one followed by one hundred zeros. That’s a ten with a hundred zeros after it. It’s bigger than the number of atoms in the entire observable universe. They wanted to suggest that they could handle that kind of enormous scale.
When they went to register the name, though, someone accidentally spelled it “Google” instead of “googol.” They liked it. Google it was.
In 1998, Larry and Sergey needed money to turn their project into a real company. They went looking for investors. A man named Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of the computer company Sun Microsystems, sat through a quick presentation, got excited, and wrote them a check for one hundred thousand dollars — before they even had a bank account to deposit it in!
They needed an office. A friend of theirs named Susan Wojcicki — who would later become the CEO of YouTube, which Google eventually bought — had a garage at her house in Menlo Park, California. She rented it to them for $1,700 a month. That garage became Google’s first real headquarters.
Two graduate students, a rented garage, and a search engine that actually worked.
Google incorporated as a company on September 4, 1998. Larry was 25. Sergey was 25. Their whole team fit around a couple of tables with some folding chairs. They had a pet dog named Yoshka who wandered around the office — and that’s actually still in Google’s official policy today: well-behaved dogs are welcome in the office.
The company grew incredibly fast. Within months they moved out of the garage into a real office. They hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein, who they paid partly in stock — which later turned out to be worth millions of dollars.
In 2000, Google became the world’s largest search engine, handling more searches than any other site on the internet.
Here’s how Google made money — and it’s actually pretty clever. When you type something into Google, you see two kinds of results: the regular results that Google’s algorithm picked because they’re relevant, and the ads — websites that paid to show up when you search for certain words. If you search for “running shoes,” a shoe company might pay Google to show their ad. But here’s the key: Google only charged the advertiser when you actually clicked on the ad. And Google’s search was so good that people clicked on relevant ads a lot. This system — called AdWords — turned out to be one of the most profitable business ideas in history.
By 2001, Google was processing over 100 million searches per day.
In 2004, something huge happened: Google went public. That means they sold shares of the company on the stock market, and anyone could buy a piece of Google. On the first day of trading, Google was valued at 23 billion dollars. Larry, Sergey, and their early employees became extraordinarily wealthy overnight. Susan Wojcicki, who had rented them her garage, had taken some early Google stock instead of full rent — and it was now worth tens of millions of dollars.
But Google didn’t stop there. They kept building new things.
In 2004, they launched Gmail — a free email service with way more storage than anyone else offered. At the time, most email services gave you a tiny bit of storage and made you delete old messages constantly. Gmail gave everyone a whole gigabyte — which at the time seemed almost impossibly generous. People waited in line for invitations to get a Gmail account.
In 2005, they launched Google Maps — which changed how everyone navigates. Before Google Maps, you had to print out directions, or buy a special GPS device, or try to read a paper map while driving. Suddenly you could see satellite photos of any street in the world, get step-by-step directions, and even see how long traffic would take.
That same year, Google bought a small company called Android that was building software for mobile phones. A few years later, Android became the operating system running on more than two billion smartphones around the world — probably including one in your house right now.
In 2006, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. At the time, some people thought that was way too much money for a website where people posted videos. Today YouTube has over two billion users and is one of the most visited sites on the internet. That purchase looks pretty smart now.
In 2008, Google released its own web browser called Chrome. Within a few years, Chrome became the most popular browser in the world, used by more people than any other.
Google also poured billions into moonshot projects — wild ideas that might seem impossible. They worked on self-driving cars, which eventually became a separate company called Waymo. They launched Project Loon, giant balloons floating in the stratosphere to bring internet access to remote areas. They built Google Glass, wearable computer glasses. Not all of these worked, but the willingness to try huge things became part of Google’s identity.
In 2015, the founders reorganized everything into a bigger company called Alphabet, with Google as its main subsidiary. Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from day-to-day management, and a man named Sundar Pichai — who had grown up in India, come to America for graduate school, and risen through Google’s ranks — became the CEO.
Today, Google handles more than 8 billion searches every single day. Think about that: 8 billion times a day, someone on Earth types a question into that simple white box, and Google finds the answer. What’s the capital of France? How do you make pancakes? Who invented the telephone? How far away is the moon?
Before Google, finding information meant going to a library, pulling out an encyclopedia, calling someone who knew, or just not knowing. Now, almost any fact that humans have ever written down is available to you in about half a second.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started with a question: what if search could actually work? They answered it in a Stanford dorm room, proved it in a rented garage, and built something that billions of people rely on every single day.
The next time you type something into Google, remember: it started with two kids who loved math, a name spelled wrong, a hundred thousand dollar check, and a garage.
Pretty good for a research project.