Google turns 28: the story behind the search engine that revolutionized the Internet
Larry Page and Sergey Brin's project began at Stanford under the name BackRub, changed its identity because of a curious mistake, and received a $100,000 check even before Google Inc. legally existed.
Google celebrates its 28th anniversary this September 27. The company that Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched in 1998 was born from a university project and ended up turning its search engine into one of the main gateways to information on the Internet.
However, Google wasn’t always called Google. The search engine’s direct predecessor appeared in 1996 at Stanford University and was named BackRub, a reference to the method used to analyze links pointing to other pages and thus determine their relevance. That work would end up becoming the basis of PageRank, the technology that made it possible to rank results in a way different from that of other search engines of the time.
From BackRub to Google and the check that propelled the company
The name change came in 1997. Page and Brin were looking for a word related to the enormous amount of information they intended to index and thought of googol, the mathematical term that represents a 1 followed by 100 zeros. According to the account preserved by Stanford, during a session to look for names Sean Anderson checked whether the domain was available, but he mistakenly typed "google.com". Page liked the variant and the domain was registered on September 15, 1997.
The project continued to grow over the following months and soon needed funding. One of the decisive moments came in 1998, when Andy Bechtolsheim , co-founder of Sun Microsystems, saw a demonstration of the search engine. After that presentation, he decided to write a check for $100,000 payable to Google Inc.
There was one problem: Google Inc. did not yet legally exist. Page and Brin could not deposit the check until they had formally incorporated the company, so they had to complete the company creation process before using that investment. That contribution was part of the initial funding with which the project definitively left the university environment.
The first servers and equipment were not installed in a large technology headquarters either. Google began working with borrowed resources and computers assembled from parts available at Stanford, before moving its operations to a garage in Menlo Park, California. There, one of the company's first offices began to operate.
The central idea was to use the web's link structure to obtain more relevant results. While many search engines of those years depended mainly on the appearance of certain words on a page, the system developed by Page and Brin also took into account which sites linked to others and the importance of those links. That difference was one of the elements that allowed the search engine to quickly gain users.
Over the years, Google stopped being just a search engine. The company expanded its operations with products such as Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Android, YouTube, and cloud computing services, while the search engine continued to be one of its main products.
Its presence even made its way into everyday language: "google" came to be used as a verb in English to refer to searching for information on the Internet and was added to Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. In Spanish, the verb "googlear" also became widespread, although the RAE recommends the adapted form "guglear".
Twenty-eight years after its establishment as a company, Google reaches this anniversary with artificial intelligence increasingly integrated into its services. The journey began with BackRub, continued with a name that arose from a misspelling of googol, and gained momentum with a check that its founders could not even cash until they officially created Google Inc.
