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Co-founder of google inc..

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We didn't start out to build a search engine at all.

Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where Lawrence’s mother, Gloria, also taught computer programming. The Page family home was full of first-generation personal computers and scientific magazines, and young Larry, as he was called, immersed himself in them. Significantly, his older brother, Carl Page, Jr., also became a successful Internet entrepreneur.

Larry Page attended a Montessori school in the primary grades and later graduated from East Lansing High School. He was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the university’s solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was there that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project.

The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining how many other Web pages linked to any one given page. Existing facilities for exploring the Web could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of websites of very little pertinence to the user’s query. Page soon found that ranking websites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a Web document’s relevance to a user’s search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new “PageRank” mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey Brin.

Together, Page and Brin wrote the paper “Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality,” and followed it with “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” The latter paper quickly became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet. For a time, Page and Brin ran the prototype of their search engine, which they named “BackRub,” on an assortment of inexpensive personal computers stored in Larry Page’s dorm room. Word quickly spread beyond the walls of Stanford that the two graduate students had created something far more useful than existing search technology.

They registered the domain name google.com in 1997. The domain name was derived from the term “googol,” the very large number written as a one followed by 100 zeros, an expression of the vast universe of data the Google search engine was designed to explore. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held company in 1998 and relocated their servers from Larry Page’s dorm room to a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Having completed their master’s degrees, they took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to concentrate on building their business. At first, Larry Page served as the company’s CEO, Sergey Brin as its president. Their stated mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

After quickly outgrowing a series of office locations, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View, California in 1999. Google has since purchased the entire property, known as the GooglePlex, one of the most unusual and innovative workplaces in the world , replete with exercise and recreational facilities.

In 2000, Google began selling text-based advertisements associated with search keywords. The text-only ads on their graphics-free homepage kept their download time to the bare minimum, and their ability to deliver ads directly related to the interests of the user made the ad space highly valuable.

That same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still enrolled as Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, attended the Academy of Achievement’s International Achievement Summit in London, England as graduate student delegates. The interview recorded at that time can be read on this website.   They returned to the annual event in 2004 as recipients of the Academy’s Golden Plate Award.

By 2001, a vast number of once-promising Internet startups had folded, but Google was growing explosively and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Novell executive Eric Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Larry Page taking the role of President for Products, and Sergey Brin as President for Technology. The three have run the enterprise as a triumvirate ever since.

Google’s initial public offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market capitalization of $23 billion. A number of Google employees with shares in the company became millionaires overnight, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin found themselves multibillionaires at age 27. Google was an immediate favorite with individual investors, and the stock price has soared. All three top executives — Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt — reduced their annual salaries to a dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their personal wealth directly to the company’s performance in the stock market.

By the end of 2006, Google had over 10,000 employees and annual revenues well over $10 billion. Various estimates place Larry Page and Sergey Brin among the two dozen richest people on Earth, and the dozen richest Americans. Despite its enormous growth, Google has largely succeeded in preserving a uniquely informal and creative atmosphere at its Mountain View campus.  Google employs a Chief Culture Officer to maintain and develop a creative and collaborative environment. Employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on independent projects. As many as half of Google’s new products originated in this Innovation Time Off program.  In 2007 and 2008, Fortune magazine, in its annual Top 100, ranked Google as the best company in the world to work for.

In addition to its in-house product development, Google has also grown through strategic acquisitions of hardware and software companies with innovative video, teleconferencing and social networking products. One of the most dramatic of these was the 2006 purchase of the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. Prior to the sale, YouTube’s earnings were negligible, but Google quickly turned it into a profit center.

The following year, Google acquired the software company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. DoubleClick technology directs display advertising to users based on their search behavior. DoubleClick complements the formidable arsenal of technologies that Google has deployed to revolutionize online advertising. AdWords places advertising in third-party websites, on a cost-per-click or cost-per-view basis. Google Analytics enables the owners of websites to study the traffic to their sites. AdSense allows these owners to display advertising on their sites; they are then paid by the advertisers on a per-click basis. Today 99 percent of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising. Users also have the option of purchasing Google Site Search, a service that provides access to the Google index without advertising.

In recent years, Google has introduced a number of popular new services and applications, including a toolbar that allows users to perform searches from their desktops, without visiting the Google website. The website itself enables searches for video and still imagery as well as text. Google Maps is a popular navigation tool, while Google Earth allows users to access satellite imagery to zoom in on locations all over the world. The most ambitious project of all, Google Book Search, aims to make the contents of vast libraries of books available and searchable online. Google Books offers free access to books that are already in the public domain, while selling digital versions of new books online.

Google also provides a free Web-based email service, Gmail, which offers its users far more storage space than most other services. The company now offers a suite of business tools, including word processing and spreadsheet applications, at a fraction of the cost of competing office software packages. Google has created its own Web browser, Google Chrome, as well as the popular Picasa photo organization and editing software. Other Google applications include: Google Calendar; Google Docs, an online tool for collaborative writing and editing; Google Translate, which can translate documents back and forth between dozens of different languages, and allows users to compare and rate alternative translations. One of the company’s most ubiquitous products is the Android smartphone operating system.

A philanthropic arm, Google.org, focuses on climate change and global issues of poverty and public health. The company has run an online poll to select nonprofit initiatives to receive $10 million in Google.org donations. One of Google.org’s principal projects is the development of a 100-mile-a-gallon hybrid automobile. As a company, Google maintains a commitment to environmentally sustainable technology. It has the largest solar power capacity of any corporate campus in the United States, and even the grounds of its green campus are grazed by a flock of goats. Google has negotiated 20-year power contracts with wind farms in Iowa, and in 2010 acquired a 20 percent stake in two wind farms built by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota.

Google has consistently supported the principle of “net neutrality” that requires broadband carriers to treat all websites equally, but Google spokesmen caution Internet users against unrealistic expectations of online privacy. The future of the Internet, they maintain, will embody a principle of “true transparency, no anonymity.” Meanwhile, Google seeks the expansion of broadband access. It provides free wireless broadband service throughout the city of Mountain View, and a subsidiary, Google Fiber, is testing wireless broadband in cities across the United States.

In 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside as CEO of Google, and Larry Page, then 38 years old, took the helm of the company he founded 13 years before. Schmidt remained with the company as executive chairman. As Google’s new CEO, Larry Page pledged to make Google “a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion of a startup.”

Later that year, Google initiated its largest acquisition yet, buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.  Motorola had been a principal manufacturer of phones running Google’s Android operating system, and the merger gave Google ownership of significant patents in the mobile phone sector.  Within two years of closing the deal, Google later sold the company to Lenovo of Japan, while keeping control of the all-important patents.  Google continues to make strategic acquisitions of startups in the fields of gaming, virtual reality, online music, image recognition and artificial intelligence.

The Google Brain Project, initiated in 2011, has used Google’s massive reserves of data and its distributed computer infrastructure to develop a large-scale artificial neural network, capable of interpreting visual, written or auditory data and learning from its own mistakes. Elements of this technology are now used in the speech recognition feature of the Android Operating System.

In 2013, the company introduced Google Glass, a hands-free voice-activated computer built into a pair of eyeglasses, with a display projected into the eye and an audio speaker audible only to the wearer.  Google Glass enables the wearer to take pictures, record video, dictate messages, navigate, and access other information without significantly obstructing the natural field of vision. Google made prototypes available on a limited basis through 2015, before withdrawing the product for further experimentation.

Google reorganized its multifarious interests as a holding company, Alphabet Inc., in 2015, with Google as its principal subsidiary.  Larry Page and Eric Schmidt retained their roles as CEO and executive chairman, respectively, at the new parent company and named a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, to head Google. Sergey Brin served as first president of Alphabet.

Today, Google remains the Internet’s most visited website, employing well over a million servers around the world to process over 3.5 billion search requests every day. In 2016, the company opened a new 11-story office complex on St. Pancras Square in London. As of that year, Google had 70 offices in more than 40 countries, and data centers across the U.S., in Chile, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, Singapore and Taiwan.

Former Stanford University president John L. Hennessy succeeded Schmidt as executive Chairman of Alphabet in 2018.  At the end of 2019, Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that they would step down from their executive positions with Alphabet.  Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet as well as Google.  Brin and Page continue to serve on Alphabet’s board; as the two largest stockholders they retain controlling interest in Alphabet and all its subsidiaries, including Google.

Since 1999, Larry Page has experienced difficulties with his voice.  By 2013, both of his vocal cords had become paralyzed, possibly due to an autoimmune disorder.  He has donated a reported $20 million to a vocal-cord nerve-function research program at Massachusetts General Hospital. His family foundation, named for his father, has donated $15 million to combat the epidemic of Ebola virus in West Africa. Larry Page and his wife, Lucinda Southworth, have their principal residence in Palo Alto, California.  As of 2021, Larry Page had amassed a personal fortune of over $100 billion. He is among the six wealthiest individuals in the world.

In January 2022, Wisk Aero, the California-based eVTOL company from Google co-founder Larry Page, announced a $450 million funding boost from The Boeing Company to further develop its Cora, an electric VTOL aircraft that the company plans to get type-certified with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as an autonomous, all-electric, air taxi. Wisk’s 6th generation eVTOL aircraft will be the first candidate for the certification of “an autonomous, all-electric, passenger-carrying aircraft in the US.”

In May 2024, Larry Page joined the $100 Billion Club with a net worth of $114 billion, thanks to his shares in Google. Although he stepped away from day-to-day operations four years ago, he remains one of the company’s largest individual shareholders.

If you use the Internet, chances are you use Google every day. The search engine and the enormously successful company that shares its name were the creation of a pair of Stanford University graduate students still in their mid-20s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

It was Larry Page who first hit on the idea of analyzing Internet links to rate their relevance to a given information search. At first Page was only interested in writing a fun and interesting dissertation, but he soon realized his idea had far greater potential. With his classmate Sergey Brin, he presented his work to acclaim at the World Wide Web conference in 1998. Within a year they had raised over $30 million to start a company, Google Inc., providing a free Web search service that can return an ordered list of results in a fraction of a second. The simple white page with the multi-colored logo was an immediate hit with Web surfers around the world. The website generates enormous revenue by providing advertising space, linked by content to the results of a given search.

When Page took the company public in 2004, he and Sergey Brin became multibillionaires overnight. That same year, they joined the select company of Academy of Achievement student delegates who have returned to the International Achievement Summit as honorees of the Academy. Today, Google is the most-used Web search service in the world, conducting more than a billion searches a day, in over 100 languages, and has given the English language a new verb: “to Google.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin have transformed the way the world accesses and uses information.

We’re talking to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. Sergey Brin, how do you see Google as a company, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Sergey Brin:   At Google, our mission is to make the world’s information accessible and useful. And that means all of the world’s information, which now, in our index, numbers over a billion documents, and it’s an incredible resource. In history, you have never had access to just pretty much all of the world’s information in seconds, and we have that now, and to make it really useful, you have to have a good way of finding whatever it is that you want.   That’s precisely what we work on at Google. My hope is to provide instant access to any information anybody ever wants in the future.

Certainly, you weren’t the only ones with that objective at the time, but you two did something about it. How do you account for that?

Sergey Brin: That’s true. Certainly anyone can say, “Oh, I want to build a car that is going to cost $5 and go 500 miles an hour,” and that would be great.

I was fortunate to be at Stanford, and I was really interested in data mining, which means analyzing large amounts of data, discovering patterns and trends. And at the same time, Larry joined Stanford in ’95, and he started downloading the Web, which it turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine. Our joint effort, just looking at the data out of curiosity, we found that we had technology to do a better job of search, and from that initial technology, we got really interested in the problem, and we realized how impactful having great search can be. So we built technology upon technology after that, to bring Google to where it is today, and we continue to develop lots of technology for tomorrow.

Why is it that you perceived the need for Google before anyone else did?

Larry Page: Well, it’s actually a great argument for pure research because…

We didn’t start out to do a search engine at all. In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web — which pages link to which pages. In computer science, there’s a lot of big graphs. Right now, (the Web) has like five billion edges and two billion nodes. So it is a huge graph. I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time, which is really what motivates me.

I started off by reversing the links, and then I wanted to find basically, say, who links to the Stanford home page, and there’s 10,000 people who link to Stanford. Then the question is, which ones do you show? So you can only show 10, and we ended up with this way of ranking links, based on the links. Then we were like, “Wow, this is really good. It ranks things in the order you would expect to see them.” Stanford would be first. You can take universities and just rank them, and they come out in the order you’d expect. So we thought, “This is really interesting. This thing really works. We should use it for search.” So I started building a search engine. Sergey also came on very early, probably in late ’95 or early ’96, and was really interested in the data mining part. Basically, we thought, “Oh, we should be able to make a better search engine.”

Search engines didn’t really understand the notion of which pages were more important. If you typed “Stanford,” you got random pages that mentioned Stanford. This obviously wasn’t going to work.

Larry Page, where do you go from here? What do you see yourself doing in ten or 20 years?

Larry Page: Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right? We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. And that’s tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint.

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The rise, disappearance, and retirement of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The duo gave up control of parent company alphabet on tuesday.

By Nick Statt , is a Senior Producer on Decoder. Previously, he wrote about technology and gaming for Naavik, Protocol, and The Verge.

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No two tech executives are quite as enigmatic and private as Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two men, who started Google more than 20 years ago while computer science graduate students at Stanford University, have hardly been seen or heard from in the last half-decade or so, since restructuring the company to create Google parent Alphabet and leaving Sundar Pichai in charge of a newly streamlined Google.

Yet on Tuesday afternoon, Page and Brin dropped a bombshell announcement : they’re relinquishing control of Alphabet to current Google CEO Sundar Pichai as well, and effectively stepping away from management for good. The news, while it sounded like a big development, felt inevitable. Page and Brin haven’t been deeply involved in the day-to-day operations of the company for some time it seems, and the announcement was making it official. It’s the Sundar Pichai show now, from top to bottom. (Page and Brin will retain their controlling shares and seats on the board, and both plan to keep in regular communication with Pichai.)

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping back for good

It’s a fitting end for two of the most mysterious tech leaders of a generation, who are both exiting their company as it hovers near $1 trillion in market cap. But it’s also a troubling time for Google. The search giant has faced increasing scrutiny from employees, media organizations, activists, regulators, and lawmakers since Page and Brin first stepped back in the summer of 2015. And many of those controversies are problems of Page and Brin’s creation, either because the duo didn’t foresee the ways in which Google could do harm or because they explicitly steered the company in a direction that flouted standard corporate ethics.

In that context, it’s important to look back at the big moments in both men’s careers and how the actions they took have had an outsized impact not just on the tech industry, but on the internet and society itself. What Page and Brin have built will likely last for decades to come, and knowing how Google got to where it is today will be an important piece in the puzzle of figuring out where it goes in the future.

AUGUST 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford University, develop PageRank, and launch Google

Page and Brin met at Stanford University in 1995, as both were in the school’s computer science graduate program. The origin of Google is a story about the origin of an idea, and that idea was Page’s vision that a World Wide Web search engine could rank links based on how often they were being linked by other pages. With Brin’s help, the idea turned into PageRank, the foundational algorithm of Google Search. The search product went live on Stanford’s network in 1996.

1996: Brin’s resume contains hidden “objective” detailing his future lifestyle

Brin’s 1996 resume remains accessible on as part of Stanford’s online archives, and you can still go read it right now . Among the projects he was working on at the time, prior to forming Google, include a movie rating platform and a code conversion tool for turning academic papers into HTML files.

But if you inspected the source code on the webpage, you’d find Brin’s hidden “objective” laid out bare: “A large office, good pay, and very little work. Frequent expense-account trips to exotic lands would be a plus.” Lucky for Brin, he would very much get to enjoy that lifestyle in his later years at Google after he moved on from being co-president with Page to heading up the company’s experimental divisions.

1998: Page and Brin rail against ad-supported search engines in Stanford paper

Although Google is now one of the most powerful forces in online advertising on the planet, Page and Brin weren’t too keen on turning their prototype search engine into an ad-selling machine, at first. In a Stanford paper titled, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” the duo laid out the case for a search engine that would not be biased toward entities that paid top dollar for higher placement:

In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

1999: Page and Brin try to sell Google for $1 million, then $750,000

While Page and Brin had officially incorporated Google, and smartly changed its name from Backrub , in 1998, the two men shortly after thought they might sell the company, apparently not quite aware of the potential of the product.

In fact, Page and Brin tried to sell Google for $1 million to internet portal company Excite in 1999, as recalled by Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla . The prominent venture capitalist was able to negotiate Page and Brin down to as low as $750,000, but Excite CEO George Bell still wouldn’t take the deal. Google is now worth nearly $913 billion.

2000: Google adopts “Don’t be evil” slogan as its primary corporate value

Accounts on the genesis “don’t be evil” differ. Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit wrote in his personal blog back in 2007 that he coined the phrase during a meeting on corporate values, as a way to “jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.”

But early engineer and future Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was once quoted as saying early engineer Amit Patel wrote it on a whiteboard in 1999. Buchheit also corroborates a portion of that account, saying after the corporate values meeting, in which he says both he and Patel lobbied for “don’t be evil,” that Patel went around the company scribbling the phrase on whiteboards to help spread it around the company.

Either way, Page and Brin agreed to make the slogan an official corporate value some time around the year 2000, convinced by Buchheit and Patel that the motto helped enshrine the company’s engineering-first approach and would stave off money-hungry tactics from the increasing number of business and sales employees Google was hiring to help sell more ads. The phrase would later become an official company motto when it was included and explained on the company’s prospectus , as part of its S-1 filing to go public. “We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results,” Page would write in the S-1.

August 2001: Page gives up CEO role to Eric Schmidt

After officially incorporating and launching Google to the public in 1998, Page and Brin were overseeing one of the fastest-growing companies in corporate history. For the graduate school dropouts, it was a bit much. Especially after Page’s high-profile attempt earlier that year to fire all of Google’s project managers, a move the company eventually reversed in an embarrassing public refutation of his leadership.

Eventually, Page and Brin, at the behest of investors, brought on Novell CEO Eric Schmidt to provide, as Brin famously painted it in a 2001 television interview , “parental supervision.” For Google stakeholders and the company’s more experienced executive leadership, it was a way to sideline the stubborn but socially awkward Page from doing too much damage to the company while it was still growing exponentially.

Ultimately, however, Page’s ability to let others step in and take the reins, a learning he would draw throughout his career, was a recognition that power and forward-facing leadership don’t always go hand in hand, and that he and Brin could both be effective at the company and retain their influence without overseeing every aspect of the business. Although at the time, Page was notoriously unhappy about having to relinquish control to non-engineers.

2002: Yahoo wants to buy Google for $3 billion, but Page and Brin don’t bite

If you someone from the year 2019 traveled back in time and told you about the eventual fate of Yahoo, it would have been hard to believe. In 2002, Yahoo was an internet giant of unprecedented size, and it wanted in on Google’s fast-growing search business . So much so that Yahoo was willing to pay up to $3 billion for it, a then-unconscionable amount of money for a startup with what Yahoo CEO Terry Semel considered lackluster revenue.

Props to Yahoo for seeing the value in Google — Yahoo leadership was right after all, about Google becoming a big thing — but Page and Brin weren’t in the mood to sell. Just three years after they were willing to take $750,000 for Google, it had grown into an entity they felt was worth more than 4,000 times that price.

Flash forward a decade and a half or so and Yahoo has been sold off to Verizon and folded into Oath, a media conglomerate ultimately rebranded as Verizon Media. Rumor has it people still use its email service.

August 2004: Google goes public at a valuation of $27 billion; Page and Brin create super-voting Class B shares

Just a few years after hiring Schmidt, Google was on a fast-moving rocket to the upper echelon of not just the tech industry, but the broader American business landscape. It filed for an initial public offering, which took place in August of 2004 and raised $1.7 billion, giving Google a valuation of $27 billion.

One particularly notable aspect of Google’s IPO was Page and Brin’s decision to create a so-called super-voting Class B stock that only they, Schmidt, and a handful of other executives were granted. That Class B stock came with 10 times the voting power of a Class A share, meaning Page and Brin would hoard just over 50 percent of it as a way to maintain control of the company in perpetuity, and that remains the case even today following their official departure.

At the time, Page described the move, which would later be copied by a number of high-profile Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, as a way to “maximize value in the long term.” That was a goal the co-founders believed shareholder concerns, which focus on near-term profit, might jeopardize. “We are creating a corporate structure that is designed for stability over long time horizons. By investing in Google, you are placing an unusual long term bet on the team, especially Sergey and me, and on our innovative approach,” Page wrote.

August 2005: Page buys Android for $50 million, without telling Schmidt

One of Page’s most prescient business calculations was the rise of mobile computing, and he moved quick to snap up a small startup by the name of Android in the summer of 2005 to the tune of $50 million. He did so without telling Schmidt , who was then still CEO, because Page believed so strongly that Android co-founder Andy Rubin could help the company make inroads in the mobile software market.

Of course, Android would go on to become the most popular mobile OS in the world. The project underwent a last-minute course correction after Rubin watched Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone in 2007 , famously viewing the presentation on a laptop while riding a cab in Las Vegas. But with the 2008 announcement of the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream, the first Android phone was out in the wild and would form the foundation for the world’s first open source mobile operating system.

October 2006: Susan Wojcicki convinces Page and Brin to approve YouTube acquisition

Susan Wojcicki was the 16th employee at Google and the person whose garage the company was literally started out of. That meant she often had the confidence of Page and Brin, but it did take some convincing on her part to get Google leadership to approve the the landmark $1.65 billion acquisition of an online video site called YouTube .

Wojcicki, who oversaw Google’s own fledging video platform, quickly and early on identified YouTube as the clear winner in what would become a contested online video race. So she moved fast to buy it while Google still had an upper hand at the negotiation table. “I saw an opportunity to combine the two services,” Wojcicki recalled in venture capitalist John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters . ”I worked up some spreadsheets to justify the $1.65 billion purchase price... and convinced Larry and Sergey.” Sounds like listening to Wojcicki was a smart decision, discounting of course the never-ending YouTube controversies of late.

September 2008: Google launches Chrome browser, thanks to Sundar Pichai

After Page and Brin hired a number of developers from Mozilla Firefox, and at the suggestion of superstar product manager Sundar Pichai, Google embarked on its quest to build a better web browser. This was despite then-CEO Schmidt’s insistence that Google stay out of what he later categorized as the “bruising browser wars.” The eventual product was Chrome. The browser’s eventual domination of the market is one of Pichai’s most stunning business successes, and it helped push the product chief toward the CEO role years later.

At the time, however, Schmidt had to be convinced it was worth the time and effort, and it was Page’s job to do so. “It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind,” Schmidt said at a press conference in 2009 of the original Chrome demo, developed by the former Mozilla engineers. Page responded during that interview that he thinks they “just wore [him] down.”

January 2011: Page takes over as CEO again and Schmidt shifts to executive chairman

After 10 years at the helm, Schmidt ended his tenure at Google with the cheeky tweet, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed.” In what was then the biggest executive shakeup in Google’s history , Page took the reins back as CEO and Schmidt took on an advisory gig as executive chairman of the board.

All three men retained their super-voting class stock that gave them complete control of the company’s direction, but the move signaled a big shift for Google. “One of the primary goals I have is to get Google to be a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up,” Page told The New York Times of the shift .

It was the beginning of a new era for the company as Page and Brin would employ their newfound control of the company to launch its Google X skunkworks, and delve further into experimental hardware and long-term projects far outside the bounds of its core product offerings.

June 2012: Brin shows off Google Glass prototype with live skydiving demo

Brin, who at this point held the official title of “Co-Founder” and who was responsible mostly for exploring new products, will forever be remembered for being the person to debut Google Glass, the first mass-produced face computer. Developed as one of the first products out of Google X (now simply just X), the internal skunkworks lab known as “ the moonshot factory, ” Google Glass was an early attempt at a heads-up display that would go on to fail rather publicly over privacy concerns, design criticism, and an overall messy and chaotic launch.

But when Brin debuted the device onstage at Google I/O in 2012, it seemed like the future had come falling out of the sky — literally. Google had hired a team of skydivers to jump out of an airplane above San Francisco while live streaming the jump from a Glass prototype. It was far and away the most impressive tech demo since the unveiling of the iPhone, and it was very much Page and Brin telling the world that Google was about much more than boring web products. They were signaling to everyone in attendance and watching online that Google would deliver the future faster than any of its competitors.

2012: Page suffers from vocal chord paralysis

Page was largely silent for most of 2012, a product of vocal chord paralysis that the newly re-minted CEO revealed the following year in a Google+ post . The condition has affected Page at various points in his life, but it hit him particularly hard the year after he took the reins back at Google. It caused him to miss the company’s 2012 I/O conference as a result.

Although Page would go on to give a speech at the 2013 I/O conference just a few days after disclosing his condition, this admission would mark the moment Page began drastically cutting down on his speaking engagements. In subsequent years, Page began skipping earnings calls and would rarely speak to the press, as his voice became increasingly quiet and hoarse due to the condition’s impact on his breathing.

May 2013: Page discusses his vision for Google Island

One of Page’s most high-profile talks and one of his last public speaking engagements took place in May of 2013 at the company’s I/O conference, one year after Brin used the same stage to announce Google Glass. There, wearing a bright red shirt under a jet black jacket, Page detailed his vision for a so-called Google Island , where technological progress could march on unabated by silly concerns like regulatory requirements and ethics.

It was mostly just Page riffing on his desire for a different kind of tech industry that didn’t have to be so beholden to corporate interests, shareholders, and advertising. He wanted a slice of the world that could just develop new tech for the sake of it and to better humanity.

But it was a weird speech, and it definitely felt like the beginning, or at leas the first public sign, of Page’s evolution into the ultra-rich, detached founder who just can’t be bothered with the day-to-day struggles of normal human beings. (As my colleague Casey Newton just wrote, Page began taking on a kind of Doctor Manhattan status over the years, and this certainly felt like a turning point in that shift.) Of course, you can’t recall this moment without mentioning tech journalist Mat Honan’s iconic and imaginative speculation about life on Google Island he wrote for Wired , now an infamous piece of tech industry fan fiction.

September 2013: Google creates Calico to focus on life extension

Following the launch of Google X, the debut of Google Glass, and the unveiling of the company’s self-driving car project, the search giant turned its sights on the sciences. In particular, Page was interested in life extension. So the company, through its Google Ventures investment arm, created Calico , a company effectively aimed at curing death. It’s headed up by Bill Maris, the founding partner of Google Ventures, who recruited former Genentech CEO Art Levinson to be its chief executive.

It was yet another signal that Page’s Google was willing to put down huge sums of money toward problems far outside the realm of online search and mobile operating systems. Calico, however, has so far seemingly failed to yield any meaningful advancements in the life sciences, medicine, or biotechnology industries. It is unclear what, if anything, the company is focused on right now.

2014: Brin has extramarital affair with employee Amanda Rosenberg

You can trace the end of Brin’s time as the exuberant, Tony Stark-like futurist face of Google to a disastrous series of headlines in early 2014 detailing his extramarital affair with an employee on the Google Glass team. The most prominent of the stories was a Vanity Fair article detailing the intricacies of the affair from start to finish as it played out the previous summer.

Amanda Rosenberg, who became a marketing manager for the device as it was moving from the experimental Google X lab to a full-fledged product, began a relationship with Brin while Brin was married to fellow Google employee Susan Wojcicki’s sister Anne Wojcicki, who was the founder and CEO of genomics company 23andMe. Rosenberg herself was publicly dating Android vice president Hugo Barra, who later moved to China to take a job with Xiaomi.

The fallout was a rare but highly visible blot on Brin’s career, although his holdings in the company would have prevented any attempt to oust him. (He retained his role as overseer of Google X.) Brin and Wojcicki divorced, and Page reportedly stopped talking to his co-founder for some time over the situation. More recently, Rosenberg has begun publicly discussing the effects the affair had on her career and personal life , and she’s also penned a book about living with bipolar disorder.

In an oral history of Google’s early days , Brin was playfully accused of being “the Google playboy” due to getting sexually involved with employees, and early HR manager Heather Cairns called him “a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen.”

October 2014: Andy Rubin leaves Google, but Page chooses not to disclose sexual misconduct claim

Amid Brin’s relationship with Rosenberg, Google was also dealing with another instance of sexual misconduct, although this one much more serious. In late 2013, Android co-founder Andy Rubin, who at that point in the company’s history was overseeing Google’s ominous-sounding Replicant robotics division, left the company. As reported to the press, it was on good terms. “I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” Page said in a statement at the time. “With Android he created something truly remarkable — with a billion-plus happy users.”

But behind the scenes, Rubin was pushed out after an employee accused of him of coercing her into performing oral sex in a hotel room. Google investigated the claim, deemed it credible, and decided Rubin had to go, but Page, Brin, and other members of the executive team allegedly decided not to reveal that information to the press.

Rubin was sent on his way with a $90 million exit package an addition $150 million stock grant. None of this would be made public until The New York Times published a story in October of 2018 detailing the allegations against Rubin and how it was handled at upper levels of Google leadership. Rubin went on to found smartphone company Essential, while Google decided to disband its robotics division and sell off its most valuable asset , robot maker Boston Dynamics, to SoftBank.

Google parent company Alphabet is now conducting an internal investigation into how its executives handled claims of sexual misconduct, after numerous other incidents similar to Rubin’s were brought to light, and following a massive employee protest in 2018 known as the Google Walkout which formed in response to the Rubin revelations.

August 2015: Google restructures as Alphabet

By the summer of 2015, Google was a remarkably different company than when Page had reassumed his CEO role four years prior. The company was involved in self-driving cars, wearable technology, the Nexus smartphone line, and numerous other product and experimental research efforts spanning artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing, and even fiber internet.

Given that complexity, it was time, in Page and Brin’s eyes, to shake things up. “Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company,” Page wrote in a blog post .

The new company would be called Alphabet , and it would remove Page and Brin from any day-to-day operations at Google proper and elevate them to CEO and president, respectively, of what is effectively a holding company. The process made Google’s financials a bit easier to parse as the various experimental divisions got broken out from Google proper. More importantly it raised Sundar Pichai to the position of Google CEO.

In the broader scope of Page and Brin’s careers, this is the moment both men decided to let go of the steering wheel and the beginning of their more serious retreat from the public eye. Of course, both still retained their super-voting class shares, and Pichai reported directly to Page. In the process of the restructuring, Google ditched “Don’t be evil” as an official motto, replaced as “do the right thing” in the Alphabet code of conduct . (Page and Brin retained the phrase in the separate Google code of conduct .)

2016: Page begins investing in “flying cars”

Page more or less disappeared off the face of the Earth after relinquishing control of Google proper to Pichai and taking on his new role as Alphabet CEO. He still made regular appearances at the company’s all-hands meetings and could be found wandering various parts of the Googleplex campus alongside Brin. But he never again would speak on an investor call, to the press, or at a product event .

What he did end up getting involved in was flying cars . More accurately, they’re eVTOLs, short for electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Page now has his hands in numerous startups, as an investor and advisor, dedicated to bringing aerial electric vehicles to market. It’s not quite clear why he’s so interested in this technology or why he has spent his years post-Alphabet restructuring putting his money toward this particular market — he has not given an interview about his interest. But it does have the air of an older, rich celebrity developing a fondness for luxury cars, with an appropriate tech twist.

January 2017: Brin makes rare public appearance to protest Trump’s immigration order

Just as Page pulled off a disappearing act in 2015, Brin too became a hermit of sorts. It’s hard to find any information on what he’s been up to in the years since becoming president of Alphabet and leaving his role at Google proper. He is reportedly working on a giant “sky yacht,” an aircraft that will ferry supplies for humanitarian missions , and joined a chorus of fellow tech leaders last year in voicing concern for the rapid development of AI . But that’s kind of it.

He did, however, show up in a personal capacity to a protest of President Donald Trump’s immigration-related executive order at San Francisco International Airport in January 2017; Brin is a Russian immigrant. That naturally made headlines , as did speeches Brin and Pichai gave to employees shortly after on the company’s commitment to supporting immigrants and opposing Trump’s executive order. Brin has not made any public appearances in support of political causes since.

September 2018: Breitbart leaks video of Page and Brin all-hands meeting after Trump’s election

While Page and Brin receded from public view starting around 2015, they were reportedly quite active in Google’s famous weekly TGIY all-hands sessions, in which executives would answer questions from employees and address big-picture topics at the company and in the news. One such session, occurring just after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, was two years later leaked to conservative news outlet Breitbart .

“Most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,” Brin is seen saying as the meeting kicks off. “I find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too. It’s a stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values. I think it’s a good time to reflect on that. ... So many people apparently don’t share the values that we have.”

This is perhaps the last time the public will ever see Google’s co-founders speaking in front of a crowd, and that feels more certain to be the case after Tuesday’s announcement. Earlier this month, Pichai announced to employees that Google will be scaling back its weekly all-hands meetings due to leaks, as pressure mounts internally and externally on Google leadership and how it has been handling the tumultuous few years since the Alphabet restructuring . But Page and Brin, although they are no longer involved in the company’s operations, do remain in control of the company given their super-voting class shares.

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Inside the life and career of Larry Page, Google's co-founder and first CEO

• Larry Page cofounded Google with his Stanford graduate school classmate Sergey Brin.
• Page served as CEO of Google from its founding until 2001 and again between 2011 and 2015.
• Page helmed Google's parent company, Alphabet , from 2015 to 2019, when Sundar Pichai took over.

Larry Page is the founder of one of the most influential tech companies in the world.

The quirky, soft-spoken computer scientist cofounded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. As Google evolved into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut, Page stayed at the helm, first as Google's CEO and later running its parent company, Alphabet.

In 2019, Page stepped down from his role at Alphabet and handed over control to Sundar Pichai . (He remains a board member and controlling shareholder of the company.)

In the years since stepping down, Page has become a virtual recluse . He spent much of the pandemic holed up on his private Fijian island, Tavarua, and burned through hundreds of millions of dollars on a futuristic car company called Kittyhawk , which shut down in 2022.

So who is Larry Page and how did he get to where he is today? Here's his story.

Page's early life

Page was born on March 26, 1973, the second son of Gloria and Carl Page — who both taught computer science at Michigan State University.

The Pages filled their home with computers and tech magazines that enthralled Larry from a young age.

They enrolled Page in a Montessori school, a program that fosters independence and creativity.

Page now credits "that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated and questioning what's going on in the world" as influencing his attitude and work.

At 12, Page read a biography about the brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla, who died in debt and obscurity. The ending made him cry and inspired Page not only to want to build world-changing technologies but to have the business sense to know how to promote them.

"I figured that inventing things wasn't any good," he has said. "You really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect."

Besides tinkering with electronics, Page also played saxophone while growing up and has said his musical training contributed "to the high-speed legacy of Google ."

Page and Sergey Brin create Google

During his time as an undergrad at the University of Michigan, Page started mulling the future of transportation, something he's still interested in.

He joined the school's solar car team and suggested that Michigan build a monorail-like "personal rapid-transit system" between its campuses.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has developed self-driving cars through Waymo , the company formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car project. Alphabet also dabbled in data-driven transportation improvements through Sidewalk Labs , which abandoned its ambitious plan for a high-tech neighborhood in Toronto in 2020.

After graduation, Page headed west to Stanford for his Ph.D., where he met Sergey Brin in 1995.

The two became close friends, geeking out about computer science.

When he was 23, Page woke up from a dream wondering if he could "download the whole web."

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So he started working on an idea to rank webpages by their inbound links, instead of by how many times they contained a queried word. He enlisted Brin's help, and they started collaborating on a search engine they initially called BackRub.

Soon, BackRub became Google, a play on the mathematical term "googol" which signifies 1 followed by a hundred zeroes.

The endeavor reflected Page and Brin's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Both Page and Brin have been known as "burners," or avid attendees of the free-wheeling art festival Burning Man .

The year after incorporating Google, they created the first-ever Google Doodle to let people know they weren't around to do damage control if the site broke — they had retreated to the Nevada desert for the festival.

Page's leadership roles at Google

In the past, Page has admitted that he's better at big-picture ideas than management, partly because he doesn't enjoy dealing with people. As a leader, he focused on results and has an affinity for ultra-ambitious ideas.

When Page was first CEO, he wrote down the following management rules that guided him:

• Don't delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
• Don't get in the way if you're not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
• Don't be a bureaucrat.
• Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn't mean they don't deserve respect and cooperation.
• The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, "No. Period." If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

Page ran Google as CEO until 2001, when Eric Schmidt was brought in to lead the company as its "adult supervision."

Brin and Page were wary of all the CEO candidates, but they took Schmidt to Burning Man and felt that at least he'd be a good fit for the company.

Page wasn't happy about having to relinquish his CEO spot at first. Eventually, though, he became comfortable being less involved in the company's day-to-day management.

Page remained actively involved in Google's product and vision during that time.

He orchestrated the acquisition of Andy Rubin's company, Android, without telling Schmidt until he'd sealed the deal.

But after 10 years, Page decided to take back the CEO title in 2011.

Page reorganizes Google

Page reorganized the company's senior management, and before the end of 2012, the company had launched several new endeavors.

They included Google Plus, its first Chromebook laptop, Google Glass , high-speed-internet service Fiber, and more.

Page continued leading Google until 2015 when the company blew up its corporate structure, and Page became the CEO of the parent company Alphabet instead. Brin would take over as president.

In a letter to investors introducing Alphabet, Page wrote: "For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!"

He added that "alpha" itself is an investment return above the benchmark — exactly what they would be striving for with Alphabet.

In his role as CEO of Alphabet, Page spent much of his time researching new technologies, meeting and enlisting really smart people, and imagining what Alphabet's next moonshot bet might be.

In the letter he wrote to investors introducing Alphabet, Page also said, "In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed." That meant Page was also spending time scouting talent for chief executive roles for Alphabet's many divisions.

Page's personal life

Throughout it all, Page has kept information about his personal life closely guarded. In a rare event in 2013, however, he opened up about having vocal cord paralysis .

The condition makes his voice softer than it used to be and makes long monologues difficult.

In 2007, Page married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist. The couple rented out a private island in the Caribbean and invited 600 guests. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was Page's best man.

Page isn't particularly showy with his wealth, but he lives well. He reportedly owns multiple homes in the Palo Alto area.

Page owns a mansion that spans 8,149 square feet, with six bedrooms and six bathrooms that he purchased in 2005 for $7 million. A couple of years later, Page built another, more "eco-friendly" home on the property that is close to 6,000 square feet and includes an elevator, a roof with solar panels, and a rooftop garden.

In September 2021, one of Page's properties caught fire and was partially destroyed by fire.

At the time, it was also unclear who — if anyone — was living in the mansion. The city of Palo Alto issued a violation notice that the home should not be used for business purposes that October.

Page's flashiest purchase is perhaps the 194-foot superyacht called "Senses," which he bought for $45 million in 2011 with a helipad and Jacuzzi on its deck.

Page has since sold the yacht and downsized to an array of smaller vessels, according to people familiar with his activities.

Page, Brin, and Schmidt have purchased at least eight private jets between them.

In 2006, court documents revealed that Schmidt had to help settle an argument between the Google co-founders , who were bickering about what size beds the "party plane" needed. They also wanted to outfit the plane with hammocks and a cocktail bar.

Investments and philanthropy

Page has also dedicated part of his wealth to causes he believes in.

In 2004, he started The Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation in honor of his father.

Carl Page died soon after Larry left for grad school because of complications caused by polio he contracted as a child.

Page has also spoken out about his father's influence in shaping his career. "My dad was really interested in technology," Page said at Google I/O in 2013.

"He actually drove me and my family all the way across the country to go to a robotics conference," he said. "And then we got there and he thought it was so important that his young son go to the conference, one of the few times I've seen him really argue with someone to get in someone underage successfully into the conference, and that was me."

The persistence paid off.

Alphabet's search engine ads machine pumps out so much money that the company can afford to spend on "other bets" that Page is passionate about, like building smarter home appliances, spreading internet through its Project Loon balloons, and extending human life.

He's also long been fascinated by flying cars and launched Kittyhawk, a mysterious flying-car startup, under the name Zee Aero in 2010. At first, Page would regularly pop into Kittyhawk's office to experiment on the workbench, but as the years went on, he began showing up less often. Then Kittyhawk shut down in 2022.

Life after Google

In December 2019, Page and Brin announced in a letter that they were stepping down from their respective roles as Alphabet CEO and president.

"Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President," the pair wrote. They added that it was time for them to "assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!"

Since stepping down, Page has largely kept out of the public eye, sharing his post-Alphabet endeavors with a small group of confidantes.

He maintains a network of properties and investments through Koop, Page's cloak-and-dagger family office .

Page owns at least five islands across the Caribbean and the South Pacific. He owns a majority stake in the leaseholder corporation of Tavarua, an island in Fiji, where he and his family holed up during the pandemic. Page also bought Cayo Norte , a large private island in Puerto Rico, for around $32 million through a limited liability company, US Virgin Island Properties, that he's been using to buy islands. He also owns an organic farm, Atomic Farm.

As of April 2024, Page's net worth of $143 billion put him at No. 7 on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

Watch: 5 ways Elon Musk shook up Twitter as CEO

• Main content

HISTORY OF GOOGLE (ALPHABET) CEOS & FOUNDERS

Google's founders.

As the 20th century drew to a close, graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University, bonding over a shared vision for organizing the burgeoning World Wide Web’s disorderly proliferation of information.

In 1998, Page and Brin formally registered the domain for Google , a new search engine leveraging the link structure of the web itself to calculate the contextual relevance of pages.

Rather than relying on text matches, Google’s insight was to quantify each site’s “authority” based on how many other pages linked to it.

With graduate research funds, Page and Brin began crawling the web to index millions of pages and analyze how they interconnected. By elevating the most reputable and relevantly linked results for each search, Google elevated access to pertinent information online.

Though merely a prototype at first, the crucial search algorithms Page and Brin created as Stanford doctoral students formed the nucleus powering one of history’s most influential internet enterprises.

Their graduate research project presaged a revolution in how we gather and utilize knowledge in the 21st century.

FORMER & PRESENT GOOGLE CEOS

ERIC SCHMIDT (2001 - 2011)

The meteoric early rise of Google left co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin struggling to manage the rapidly expanding complexities of turning their search engine start-up into a sustainable business.

Still in their late 20s, the former Stanford doctoral students lacked the executive experience necessary as their creation began revolutionizing how people accessed information on the anarchic World Wide Web.

So in 2001, Google’s venture capital investors convinced Page and Brin to bring on an established industry veteran who could provide adult supervision and mentorship.

They recruited Eric Schmidt, a distinguished computer expert who had previously served as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems before running Novell as CEO throughout the ’90s.

Schmidt provided a stabilizing hand as Google’s first CEO, shepherding the founders’ engineering vision toward profitability.

Under Schmidt’s leadership, Google cemented its utter dominance over web search while pioneering targeted text advertising tied to specific queries—an enormously lucrative innovation that became the company’s profit engine.

As CEO for a monumental decade spanning 2000-2010, Schmidt also oversaw Google’s expansion far beyond core search functionality, encompassing mapping technologies, video sharing sites, web-based email, and productivity software.  

With Schmidt as their sagely counsel, Page and Brin were free to direct their talents toward building the technological future they imagined.

But having now gained a decade of wisdom from Schmidt’s stewardship through Google’s ascent toward global tech supremacy, the young founders felt ready to reassert control as CEOs themselves and build upon their early vision well into the 21st century.

Schmidt stepped aside in 2011, leaving Google’s further trajectory to the once-inexperienced Stanford grad students who first dreamed it into existence.

LARRY PAGE (2011 - 2015)

After a decade learning at the heel of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page took back the reins as Google’s CEO in 2011, ready to lead the company into the future he and Sergey Brin had imagined since founding their search engine as Stanford graduate students years before.

With Schmidt staying on as Executive Chairman, Page remained free to pick his brain while finally getting the chance to execute his visions directly as chief executive.

Page led Google into ever more ambitious technological realms, directing innovative projects that seemed the stuff of science fiction made real—like Google Glass bringing augmented reality seamlessly into everyday life through wearable computers, and self-driving cars close to attaining full autonomy on public roads.

But even as a visionary leader, Page recognized that Google had sprawled into a hugely complex, multi-faceted company that would benefit from restructuring.  

So in 2015 Page made the landmark decision to form Alphabet, a new parent corporation that would allow him to step back from Google’s massive day-to-day business and focus on cutting-edge research through Alphabet subsidiaries like Calico Life Sciences working toward human longevity.

Google itself became the lead subsidiary delivering Alphabet’s commercial products and services, leaving Page in essence still its CEO but with autonomy delegated to trusted lieutenants.

From Alphabet’s formation onward, Page and Brin have been poised to shepherd Google technologies toward their most imaginative conclusions, venturing beyond conventional paths and changing paradigms to realize innovations once relegated to fantasy—much as Google itself did for internet search when two ambitious Stanford doctoral candidates first dreamed it up at the close of the 20th century.

SUNDAR PICHAI (2015 - PRESENT)

With Alphabet launched in 2015, Larry Page passed the baton of Google leadership to trusted deputy Sundar Pichai, allowing Page to focus on big-picture guidance of Alphabet’s constellation of tech ventures.

As just the third CEO in Google’s short history, Pichai charted a course cementing the company’s dominance in existing fields while pushing innovation into emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.

An engineering veteran who had rapidly risen through Google’s ranks since 2004, Pichai oriented Google ever more toward AI-driven solutions leading the charge in what many deem an AI revolution on par with the advent of personal computing decades before.

Major initiatives under Pichai’s ongoing tenure include knowledge engines like RankBrain integrating AI into Google’s core search functionalities, as well as the DeepMind algorithmic system that defeated a world champion player of the supremely complex game Go in 2017—representing a landmark achievement in replicating human logic.

Beyond software, Pichai also supervised Google’s forays into consumer device hardware—a complementary expansion to maintain the company’s foothold as users increasingly accessed Google services through mobile technologies.

Key hardware product lines launched under Pichai’s leadership include the Pixel smartphone intended to showcase Google’s suite of mobile services, along with voice-assistant speakers like Google Home as intelligent AI hubs managing integrated smart homes.

Through Pichai’s strategic stewardship since 2015, Google has consolidated its dominance of mobile ecosystems, cloud computing, and integration of artificial intelligence across both consumer and enterprise setting.

Fortifying its position as an integral technology titan even as co-founders Page and Brin plot long-term research frontiers from their vantage points within Alphabet.

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Wikipedia - History of Google

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The History of Google and How It Was Invented

Computer Scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin

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Search engines or internet portals have been around since the early days of the internet . But it was Google, a relative latecomer, that would go on to become the premier destination for finding just about anything on the World Wide Web.

Definition of a Search Engine

A search engine is a program that searches the internet and finds webpages for you based on the keywords that you submit. There are several parts to a search engine, including:

• Search engine software such as boolean operators, search fields, and display format
• Spider or "crawler" software that reads web pages
• Algorithms that rank results for relevancy

Inspiration Behind the Name

The very popular search engine called Google was invented by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The site was named after a googol —the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros—found in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman. To the site's founders, the name represents the immense amount of information that a search engine has to sift through.

Backrub, PageRank, and Delivering Search Results

In 1995, Page and Brin met at Stanford University while they were graduate students in computer science. By January 1996, the pair began collaborating on writing a program for a search engine dubbed Backrub, named after its ability to do backlink analysis. The project resulted in a widely popular research paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

This search engine was unique in that it used a technology they developed called PageRank that determined a website's relevance by taking into account the number of pages, along with the importance of the pages, that linked back to the original site. At the time, search engines ranked results based on how often a search term appeared on a webpage.

Next, fueled by the rave reviews that Backrub received, Page and Brin began working on developing Google. It was very much a shoestring project at the time. Operating out of their dorm rooms, the pair built a server network using cheap, used, and borrowed personal computers. They even maxed out their credit cards buying terabytes of disks at discount prices.

They first tried to license their search engine technology but failed to find anyone that wanted their product at an early stage of development. Page and Brin then decided to keep Google and seek more financing, improve the product, and take it to the public themselves when they had a polished product.

Initial Funding

The strategy worked, and after more development, the Google search engine eventually turned into a hot commodity. Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim was so impressed that after a quick demo of Google, he told the pair, "Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?"

Bechtolsheim's check was for $100,000 and was made out to Google Inc., despite the fact that Google as a legal entity did not exist yet. That next step didn't take long, however—Page and Brin incorporated on September 4, 1998. The check also enabled them to raise $900,000 more for their initial round of funding. Other angel investors included Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. 

With sufficient funds, Google Inc. opened its first office in  Menlo Park , California.  Google.com , a beta (test status) search engine, was launched and answered 10,000 search queries every day. On September 21, 1999, Google officially removed the beta from its title.

Rise to Prominence 

In 2001, Google filed for and received a patent for its PageRank technology that listed Larry Page as the inventor. By then, the company had relocated to a larger space in nearby Palo Alto. After the company finally went public, there were concerns that the one-time startup's rapid growth would change the company culture, which was based on the company motto "Do No Evil." The pledge reflected a commitment by the founders and all employees to carry out their work with objectivity and without conflicts of interest and bias. To ensure the company stayed true to its core values, the position of chief culture officer was established.

During the period of rapid growth, the company introduced a variety of products, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Voice, and a web browser called Chrome. It also acquired streaming video platforms YouTube and Blogger.com. More recently, there have been forays into different sectors. Some examples are Nexus (smartphones), Android (mobile operating system), Pixel (mobile computer hardware), a smart speaker (Google Home), broadband (Google Fi), Chromebooks (laptops), Stadia (gaming), self-driving cars, and numerous other ventures. Advertising revenue generated by search requests remains its biggest earnings driver, however.

In 2015, Google underwent a restructuring of divisions and personnel under the conglomerate name Alphabet. Sergey Brin became president of the newly-formed parent company, Larry Page the CEO. Brin's position at Google was filled with the promotion of Sundar Pichai. Collectively, Alphabet and its subsidiaries consistently rank among the top 10 most valuable and influential companies in the world. 

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A Brief History of Google From 1998 to the Present Day

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How I Organize My To-Do Lists in Apple Reminders

Think you could never fall victim to cybercrime think again, this new stealthy malware targets illegal movie downloads: here's what to know, key takeaways.

• Google, with a net worth of over one trillion dollars, has grown from its humble beginnings in a garage to become one of the world's largest and most influential companies.
• The history of Google spans 25 years, from its founding by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 to its expansion into various products and services, such as Google Search, Google Ads, YouTube, Android, Google Workspace, and Chrome.
• Google's success can be attributed to its innovative products and acquisitions, such as the PageRank algorithm, the acquisition of YouTube, the development of the Android operating system, the launch of Chrome and Chromebooks, and the introduction of the Pixel smartphone. Additionally, AI has become a priority for Google, as evident by its response to the growth of the ChatGPT AI chatbot.

Google is both the name of the world’s largest search engine and the corporation behind it. It is one of the most famous company names in the world, primarily due to the Google search engine utilized by billions of people every day. The net worth of Google eclipses one trillion dollars (market capitalization) in 2023.

So, Google is a massive company that’s grown enormously since its humble garage base beginning. The history of Google LLC spans 25 years. This is the story of how Google became the giant company it is today.

1997-1998: The Founding of Google

The Ph.D. computer science graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page first met at Stamford University during the mid-1990s. It was there and then that the duo collaborated in the development of a new internet search engine, initially called BackRub. However, that search engine was renamed Google and trialed on Stamford’s website in 1996.

Page and Brin registered the Google.com domain name in 1997 to unleash the new search engine globally. The Google search engine quickly became a popular tool for finding webpages. What set it apart from other search engines of the time was its unique PageRank algorithm that ranked results based on the number and importance of pages that linked back to sites.

However, Google was still somewhat smaller than the Yahoo search engine at that time. Page and Brin offered to sell their search engine’s PageRank algorithm to Yahoo for about $1 million. Yahoo declined the offer, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Launching the Google search engine was one thing, but starting the company was quite another. Larry and Sergey needed investors to provide the required funds for a new company start-up.

It didn’t take long for them to find one when they showed Google off to Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. He was immediately impressed by what he saw and heard and gave Brin and Page a $100,000 startup check for Google Inc.

That $100,000 check was enough to get Google off the ground. The Google Inc company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Another funding round followed, with the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos investing in Google.

Google established its first office base within Susan Wojcicki’s garage. You can view Google’s first office on this Google Maps page . Hold your mouse's left button to rotate the camera on that page and have a look around Google's first office.

2000: Google Launches AdWords

The fledgling Google company first started selling ad placements on its search engine in 2000. The launch of Google AdWords enabled businesses to bid for keyword ad placement on the search engine. Today, Google Ads is one of Google’s biggest cash cows, generating more than 100 billion in revenue annually.

2001: Schmidt Becomes Google’s First Appointed CEO

Larry Page was Google’s first CEO up to 2001. However, Page and Brin were still young at the time and accepted somebody with more business management experience was needed to lead their expanding company. They appointed former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt to be Google’s chief executive in 2001.

Schmidt was Google’s longest-serving CEO from 2001-2011, during which time he presided over an era of massive company growth. When he stood down in 2011, he joked in a tweet that adult supervision of Google was no longer required. Mr. Page replaced Schmidt in 2011, and Sundar Pichai became Google’s current CEO in 2015.

2003: Google Moves to Amphitheatre Parkway

Google didn’t stay in Wojcicki’s garage for long, but by 2003 it was clear the company needed a bigger site to call home.

So, it was in 2003 that Google set up camp in Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. That site was initially leased to Google, but the company later purchased properties there to establish Googleplex. Googleplex remains Google’s company headquarters today.

2006: Google Acquires YouTube

In 2005, Google launched a Google Videos website that went head-to-head with another new video-sharing site called YouTube. The YouTube site, founded by Steven Chen, became a much bigger hit on the internet.

Google gave up trying to compete with YouTube in 2006 and arranged to meet with Chen at a Denny’s restaurant to munch some food and discuss a proposed acquisition of his video-sharing site.

Eric Schmidt convinced Mr. Chen to sell YouTube to Google for 1.65 billion, an amount that considerably eclipsed the company’s Android acquisition. As Google couldn’t beat YouTube, the search giant had to buy it. The Big G later shut down Google Videos, and YouTube became the second most visited website after Google Search.

2006: Google Web Apps Whip Up a Productivity Cloud

Google was influential in the invention of cloud computing, otherwise web-based productivity apps, in 2006. Then Google released the Sheets, Docs, and Slides online apps. They were part of a new Google Apps suite (now Workspace) that also included Gmail.

The new Sheets, Docs, and Slides apps enabled users to word process documents, create spreadsheets, and set up slideshows within their browsers for the first. It was a significant milestone in the history of the World Wide Web . The Google Workspace suite is now one of the biggest competitors to Microsoft Office.

2008: The Android Revolution

Google brought out a struggling Android company in 2005 for a price of approximately $50 million, which turned out to be one of the greatest coups in the company’s history. The Android team duly moved to Googleplex and continued developing a new Linux-based mobile phone operating system. Development of the first Android 1.0 version was complete by the end of 2007.

Google established the grand Open Handset Alliance, and the OHA unveiled the first Android OS. HTC released the T-Mobile G1 in 2008, which was the world’s first Android-based smartphone. Google’s Android OS had become the world’s foremost smartphone platform by 2012.

Android is currently the world’s biggest OS series, with a mobile operating system market share of approximately 70-71 percent as of July 2023, according to Statista .

2008-2012: The Rise of Chrome

Eric Schmidt has admitted he rejected the idea of a Google web browser when Page and Brin first proposed such a product to him. Schmidt doubted a Google browser could stand up to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Larry and Sergey ignored Google’s chief executive and encouraged the development of a new web browser under the direction of the then-future CEO Pichai. Schmidt changed his mind when he saw a Chrome demo version.

Google released Chrome in 2008, which sparked a new browser war with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google Chrome emerged as the winner in that war when it overtook Internet Explorer’s user share in 2012. Chrome now dominates the browser industry with a market share of 63.55 percent in July 2023, according to StatCounter .

2009-2013: ChromeOS Chromebooks Shake Up the Laptop Industry

A Google laptop operating system was another product idea Schmidt was initially skeptical about, for that would also inevitably encroach on Microsoft’s territory.

Nevertheless, Google still unveiled ChromeOS in 2009. The first commercial Acer and Samsung Chromebook laptops based on ChromeOS became available in 2011. Google later launched its own-brand Chromebook Pixel in 2013, which was among the company’s first notable hardware products.

Chromebooks made a big splash in the education market from 2012 onward as more and more schools snapped them up. Schools across America fell in love with Chromebooks because they were a more economical and less complicated alternative to Windows PCs.

In recent years, Chromebooks have become more popular in the general consumer market and even outsold MacBooks for the first time in 2020.

2016: Google Launches the First Pixel Smartphone

After the Chromebook, Google expanded further into the hardware industry by launching its first Android-based Pixel Phone in 2016. That was the first of eight Google Pixel smartphones released from 2016 to 2023. The most recently unveiled Pixel Fold is Google’s first foldable mobile device .

The original Pixel mobile was the first to incorporate Google Assistant. It also had a great camera, superior to the snappers on many other mobiles in 2016. Although Google remains a relatively small player in the mobile device industry compared to Apple, its Pixel mobiles have become an increasingly attractive alternative to iPhones.

2022: Pichai Declares a Code Red

The popular ChatGPT AI chatbot became the fastest-growing app ever from 2022 to 2023 and scared Google. Pichai reputedly declared a Google code red at the end of 2022 to establish an urgent response to ChatGPT. Thus, AI has seemingly now become a big priority for Google.

Google’s first response to ChatGPT seems to be Search Generative Experience. That is an experimental AI-powered search tool from Google. You can sign up to be among the first to try the Search Generative Experience today. Check out our how-to access Search Generative Experience guide for further details about how to join its waitlist.

Google is One of the World’s Biggest Companies

Google (now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc) has undoubtedly come a long way since Page and Brin camped out in Wojcicki’s garage in 1998. Today, it is ranked among the most valuable companies in the world after Apple, Microsoft, and Aramco in terms of market capitalization.

Google has been the most influential internet company in history, with the world’s biggest search engine, web browser, and video-sharing site among the foremost products to its name.

Almost Everything You Need to Know About Google’s History

You are probably on this page because of google. from 1995 to global domination, here is the untold story of the tech giant..

Christopher McFadden

Shawn Collins/Flickr

Google is one of the wealthiest and most all-pervasive companies in the world, and the company’s history is a story of classic entrepreneurialism, hard work, and a little luck.

From humble beginnings, the company has blossomed into a world leader in online advertising, cloud computing, software, and hardware solutions.

Alexa , a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google.com as the most visited website in the world.

RELATED: HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY, GOOGLE!

Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” but it also has an unofficial statement – “Don’t be evil.”

Ingus Kruklitis/iStock

This motto was replaced in 2015 to “ Do the right thing .” Some might chuckle at this, given that Google’s philanthropic mission has been  increasingly  called into doubt due to several actions that appear to contradict this motto.

So how did they do it? Here is our short biography of almost everything you need to know about Google’s history.

Google’s conception

Google’s history began in 1995 when Larry Page met Sergey Brin. At the time, Larry Page was a Ph.D. student at Standford University, and Sergey was considering studying there. In 1996, the pair began work on a search engine called BackRub .

The name comes from the algorithm-generated ranking for how many “back-links” a page has. This engine worked on the Stanford servers for more than a year before it eventually clogged up the bandwidth and was forced to move. Google.com was registered on September 15th, 1997.

The name, Google, is a play on “googol,” a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros . It is rumored that this reflects the founders’ mission to organize the infinite amount of information on the internet.

In 1998, Page launched a monthly newsletter called “ Google Friends Newsletter ” to inform fans about the company. This has since been replaced with blogs such as Google+.

In August of 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to the as-yet non-existent company Google Inc. He did this after seeing a quick demo on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto.

Niharb/Flickr

Google cashes in

Initially, there was no way to deposit this check because it was made out to “Google Inc.” At the time, there wasn’t a legal entity with that name. The check sat in Page’s desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin rushed to set up a corporation and locate other investors.

If you like Google’s doodles, you might be interested to know that the very first one was the iconic “Burning Man” icon. This was put up in August 1998 to let users know where the team was for the next few days – a nice touch.

Google was incorporated on September 4th, 1998, as a private company. The founders opened a bank account and could finally deposit Bechtolsheim’s investment.

Google’s first office was, classically, a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. It came with a remote controller for the garage door.

Google also hired its first employee,  Craig Silverstein , who stayed with the company for more than ten years before joining another startup – Khan Academy.

In 1999, Google moved from its humble garage to new digs at 165 University Avenue, Palo Alto. At this time, they were eight employees strong. Their most crucial team member, Yoshka, the dog, also joined the team at this time.

Google also hired its first chef, Charlie Ayers . His previous claim to fame was catering for the Grateful Dead. By the time he left Google in 2006, Ayers and his team of five chefs and 150 employees were serving 4,000 meals daily in 10 cafes across the company’s headquarters campus. 

Prawny/Pixabay

VC’s “Anti-portfolio”

Andy Bechtolsheim’s investment gamble paid off, but other potential early investors missed their opportunity. Bessemer Investments partner, David Cowan , heard about Brin and Page in 1998 while they were still working in the garage but failed to invest. This decision has been called the “ anti-portfolio .” 

Another missed opportunity for investors occurred in the early months of 1999 when Page and Brin toyed with the idea of selling their project to focus on their studies. George Bell, CEO of Excite, was approached with a $1M buyout offer.

Bell rejected this offer as “preposterous.” Follow-up negotiations almost led to a $750,000 counteroffer, but Brin and Page stuck to their guns. According to George Bell, they asked for investment instead, but he decided against it. 

stevepb/Pixabay

About five months later, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Sequoia Capital agreed to invest  $25 Million in the company. These two venture capital firms were typically fierce rivals. Seeing Google’s potential, however, they both took seats on the board of directors. Even with this new funding, the board met around a ping-pong table .

As impressive as the missed offers are, they are trumped by the story of Oingo and James Altucher . After refusing six offers to purchase the fledgling company, Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics and accepted the seventh offer – from Google – for around $102 million in cash and stock. They are now known as Google AdSense .

Today,  Alphabet Inc (Google’s parent company) is listed on NASDAQ with a market capitalization of around $560B.  

Here’s the  story .

A giant falls – Yahoo!

Search engine Yahoo!, once a giant of the internet, merged with Verizon in 2017, marking the end of an era for a company that once almost defined the internet.

MIH83/Pixabay

Its golden age was in the 1990s, but Yahoo’s failure to keep up with current trends ultimately sealed its fate. It can be argued that a significant contributor was also its leaders’ failure to take advantage of opportunities to innovate.

Page and Brin originally wanted to be academics, not business owners. After developing their initial search engine, they tried to raise investment, or sell the company. After failing to find a buyer, they finally went to Yahoo!

Yahoo! turned them down.

Yahoo! had developed search directories designed to answer questions. Their approach seemed to work well at the time. With an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of mentality, they didn’t want their users to leave their platform, so they rejected the chance to buy the PageRank algorithm  (the basis for Google Search today), which worked by ranking links of third parties.

Yahoo! really blew it, it turns out.

As we now know, the world realized the importance of those third-party links. Using software developed by Applied Semantics, Google built its pay-per-click service, AdWords , which has been the most significant contributor to its current success.

In 2002, Brin and Page approached Yahoo! once again. This time, they needed to raise $3 Billion in funds. Terry Semel , then Yahoo! the CEO, once again refused the offer as Yahoo! was looking to build its answer to Google.

4×6/iStock

Yahoo! acquired search engine Inktomi and ad revenue software company maker Overture, while Google acquired Applied Semantics.

This proved to eventually be a fatal error, as Google took off and Yahoo! was eventually absorbed into Verizon’s AOL internet business. 

However, if Yahoo! had agreed on the deal with Google back in 2002, Yahoo!’s fate would possibly have been much different.

The turn of the century saw Google’s rise to dominance

2001 saw Google’s first public acquisition, Deja.com Usenet Discussion Service, an archive of  500 million  user discussions dating back to 1995.

Other improvements to Google included multilingualism, international celebrations (Bastille Day), and Google toolbar, a plugin that allows the user to search without opening the homepage. 

Depositphotos

Google kept things light by adding “joke languages,” including Klingon, and launching Google Images. Google also launched its first international office in Tokyo. Additionally, in 2001, Google released its first annual “ Google Zeitgeist ,” which looks at what millions of people searched for over the previous year – a tradition that continues to this day.

Google keeps going from strength to strength.

In 2002, Google introduced additional ad services with its Google Search Appliance and the addition of cost-per-click pricing to its Adwords. Google Labs was also born in 2002, and the company opened its first office in Australia.

In 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs and announced Google AdSense, discussed above, which allowed advertisers to easily connect with vast networks of websites. AdSense works by matching ads to websites using an algorithm that bases the placement on the type of content and the number of visitors. This was not only a boon to advertisers but caused the blogging movement to explode in popularity by making it easy for bloggers to earn revenue based on their subject matter and number of viewers. Google also launched Google Grants, a nonprofit edition of AdWords.

Google grew so quickly that its offices filled up. By 2004, the company had grown to more than  800  employees. So, they moved to new offices at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, known as the “Googleplex.” Gmail was launched as an invite-only service on April Fools Day that year. It now has more than  425 million  users.

PublicDomainPictures/Pixabay

Google also acquired Picasa. But the big event of the year for Google was its listing on the stock market with an IPO of  19,605,052  class A shares at $85 each. In December, Google established Google.org, which was dedicated to the idea that technology can change the world.

Also in 2004, Google launched its  Google Scholar service, a free web-based service that indexes the full text, or metadata, of scholarly literature across many publishing formats and disciplines.

Google Scholar includes a vast array of peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents, to name but a few. While not official, some have estimated that it contains over 380 million documents. 

Kicking into overdrive

The following year, Google Maps was born, with satellite imagery and directions added a few months later.

Also in 2005, YouTube’s (not yet part of Google) first video went online. Phone apps became a big part of Google’s strategy in 2005, with search software and Google Maps available on mobile platforms. Google Earth came online that summer. At the same time, Google Analytics was launched to help developers measure their marketing impact, and offices opened in Sao Paulo and Mexico City.

The word Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. The company’s mission to organize data continued with Google Calendar and Finance. “Google Trends” launched, and Youtube was acquired for $1.65 billion.

TARIK KIZILKAYA/iStock

Also, in 2006, Google Translate was first launched to break language barriers and make the world more accessible. 

Over the following years, Google Translate has added, and now supports, more than 100 different languages from around the world. The service, like human children, has also learned how to see, understand, talk, listen, have conversations, write, and lean on friends for help through its Google Translate’s community . It still has a hard time translating basic text, but with the growth of AI, this is set to improve.

The same year, Google launched its revolutionary Google Docs and Spreadsheets service. The former originated from two separate products, Writely and XL2Web, which Google later acquired. XL2Web was acquired by Google in 2005. Writely was a  web-based   word processor  created by software company Upstartle, which was acquired by Google in 2006. Short;y  afterward, Google launched Spreadsheets. In October 2012, Google Documents became simply Google Docs, and Google Spreadsheets was officially renamed Google Sheets. 

Cesar Solorzano/Flickr

2006 also saw the launch of  Google Presentations , a free presentation program that was renamed Google Slides in 2012 and is now an integral part of Google’s Office suite. Google Presentations resulted from Google’s acquisition of Tonic Systems. 

In 2007, Fortune ranked Google as the number one company to work for. Streetview debuted that year, initially only in U.S. cities. It is now available in more than 50 countries. The Android operating system was also created in 2007.

Google Chrome was born in 2008 and fast became one of the world’s most-used web browsers. In 2009, Google released Google Voice. Google also hired some goats to clean up their Googleplex campus and reduce fire hazards by eating the bush on the campus grounds.

PhotoMIX_Company/Pixabay

2011 saw the launch of Google Flights . This service was the product of Google’s acquisition of ITA Matrix Software (a travel industry software best known for its Matrix flight search). 

In case you are not aware, this service enables users to search for and book flights through third-party suppliers. It has, in its way, helped challenge the dominance of other sites like Kayak or Skyscanner. 

In 2014, Google launched its free web service Google Classroom . Created to simplify the creation, distribution, and grading of assignments, it has since proved pivotal in streamlining the process of sharing files between teachers and their students. 

Since then, Google has added multiple improvements to the service, including integration with Google Calendar, newly illustrated themes and other options, and integration with Google Meet . 

2015 saw the launch of  Google Photos (not to be confused with Google Images). This free photo-sharing and storage service was originally part of Google+ before being spun off. 

Google Photos gives its users free, unlimited storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution. In 2016, Google announced that their  Picasa desktop application  would be discontinued, and the Picasa Web Albums service would be closed the same year.

SpVVK/iStock

Apparently, the primary reason for retiring Picasa was to focus its efforts “entirely on a single photo service”; the cross-platform, web-based Google Photos.

The sky is the limit.

Google expanded into internet delivery with its plan to build ultra-high-speed broadband networks in 2010. Bike trails were added to Google Maps in 2010.

Google Maps

To make an effort at transparency, Google also published information that allowed users to remove content from their products while helping to make access less transparent, blocking access to services at the request of authoritarian governments across the world.

As part of its efforts to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, Google made its  first direct investment  in a large-scale renewable energy project. Google also announced its plan to develop self-driving cars.

Google+ launched in 2011, with Google Drive released a year later in 2012. In August 2011, reports estimated that Google had almost one million servers in data centers worldwide.

The installation of Google Fiber began in 2012 by supplying consumers in Kansas. The company also created the Global Impact Awards to support entrepreneurs who use technology to tackle human challenges to burnish the company’s image for sustainability.

In 2013, Google topped up its commitment to renewable energy by investing $200 million in a wind farm in Texas. The company also unveiled a plan to provide balloon-powered internet access, so-called “ Project Loon ” and teamed up with Starbucks to provide free WiFi to all Starbucks stores in the U.S.

JohnFScott/iStock

In 2014, Google acquired Nest and added Street View imagery of the Canadian Tundra to give users an intimate view of Polar Bears in their natural habitat. In 2015, Google announced its plans to re-organize its interests into a conglomerate called Alphabet.

Google would continue as the umbrella company, however.

What is the history of Google’s logo?

Google’s iconic logo has undergone several changes and revivals throughout its history. The first logo, designed by Brin, was created using GIMP. A revised logo was designed by graphic designer Ruth Kadar and was used between 1999 and 2013. The script was based on the Catull typeface, an old serif typeface designed by Gustav Jaeger for the  Berthold Type Foundry in 1982 .

Google unveiled a revised logo in September 2015.

The company’s logo also regularly undergoes modifications, such as including different graphics on holidays, birthdays of famous people, or major events. These special logos, some designed by Dennis Hwang, have become known as Google Doodles .

But what about the colors? Graphic designer Ruth Kedar explains, “There were a lot of different color iterations. We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn’t follow the rules.”

Mizter_X94/Pixabay

How has Google’s logo evolved over time?

The highly recognizable Google logo received its first “major” overhaul in 2010. This new logo was first previewed in November 2009 and officially launched in May 2010. Though perhaps not an enormous amendment, after all, it used the same typeface, but the “o” had a facelift, replacing its yellowish color with a distinctly more orange hue.

In 2013, the company introduced a new “flat” logo with a slightly altered color palette. One year later, Google updated its logo once again with the second “g” moved to the right by one pixel and the “l” down and right one pixel.

September 2015 saw the introduction of Google’s “new logo and identity family.” This was designed to work across multiple devices. The one notable difference in the logo is a change to the typeface.

The colors remained the same; however, Google switched to a modern, geometric sans-serif typeface called Product Sans, created in-house and used for the Alphabet logo.

15+ things you may not have known about Google

To wrap things up a bit, here are some things you may or may not know about Google. This list is far from exhaustive and is in no particular order.

georgeclerk/iStock

1. Keep it in the family

Carl Page, Larry’s brother, helped start the eGroups and dot.com company in the 1990s. It was bought by Yahoo! for almost half a billion dollars in 2000. If Google had flopped, Larry probably would’ve been ok – nice.

2. Birds of a feather

A little-known chap, Robin Li, had developed a similar concept to Google when he worked for a company owned by Dow Jones. Both proposals were based on ranking pages on links, not content. Dow Jones wasn’t sure what to do with the idea (called RankDex), so Li left the company and moved to China. While there, he licensed the idea and formed Baidu, where he is still the CEO. Baidu earned $14.3 billion last year and still dominates China’s search engine market.

3. Stanford sell out

Google Search is based on an algorithm called PageRank. You may intuitively think this is based on the rank system but it’s named after Larry Page. Stanford still holds the patent for this. They received 1.8M shares of stock in Google for Google’s use of the patent, which they sold in 2005 for $336 million. Just goes to show that encouraging developers in academia can pay off.

4. Oblivion

Google Search’s PageRank not only ranks pages based on links but can also show which “species” are about to go extinct. In effect, it works by determining which pages have the most links to them and thus is less likely to disappear into obscurity.

Pretty neat.

5. Everything is politics

Page and Brin, unsurprisingly, are two of the richest men in the US. Did you know that they don’t make any political contributions personally? Their contemporaries do, however.

Google as an entity , on the other hand, does make contributions to a large number of PACs. In 2019, Google gave around $570,000 to Republicans and around $460,000 to Democrats. This was dwarfed by employee contributions, however, who donated around $2.3 million to Democrats and just $73,000 to Republicans.

Damian Gadal/Flickr

6. I’m Feeling Lucky

It is estimated that the “ I’m Feeling Lucky ” button costs Google $110 million in ad revenue annually. When you click that button, it just takes you to the top search result. In other words, you skip all the ads that Google makes money on.

This leaves the obvious question, “Why keep it?” Results from focus groups have shown that people feel more comfortable with the button there. However, users rarely “feel lucky,” as it’s hardly ever used.

7. Number One Employee

Google’s first employee, Craig Silverstein, continued working at the company until 2012, though he’d moved up the ladder a bit. He now works for the Khan Academy. It is estimated that his total worth is around $950 million.

See, loyalty does pay.

8. Why is Google’s homepage so bland?

It is rumored that the home page is so sparse because the founders didn’t know HTML code and just wanted a quick interface. Also, initially, there wasn’t even a “submit” button. Users had to hit the “return” key to generate a search.

9. Did you mean?

Google’s traffic doubled after introducing this feature. Its usefulness is obvious to anyone who has ever used its search engine, especially the incorporation of its handy spellchecker.

10. Two pennies to rub together

Brin and Page used to hang out around the Stanford Computer Science Department, loading docks in the hope of being able to borrow newly-arrived PCs to use in their network.

Garen M./Flickr

11. First data center

Google’s first data center was Larry Page’s dorm room.

12. That’s good enough

When Page and Brin were trying to find buyers to license their search tech, one CEO responded interestingly. “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t care about search.”

13. Grow some balls!

When Google first moved to Googleplex, large rubber balls were repurposed as high-mobility office chairs. This was handy, as the office was an open, non-cubicle environment. 

14. Too hot to handle

USA Today named Google a “hot site” in September 1999.

Google.com’s Beta label was removed on September 21st, 1999.

16. Dig at Yahoo!

In 1998, Page created a computerized version of the word Google using the free graphics program GIMP. He changed the typeface and added an exclamation mark to mimic or mock Yahoo!’s logo.

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Still here? Great. Now you can impress your friends with your knowledge of Google’s history. Have we missed out on any major events? What do you think of Google?

Even more important, do you consider them a force for good or ill?

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Christopher McFadden Christopher graduated from Cardiff University in 2004 with a Masters Degree in Geology. Since then, he has worked exclusively within the Built Environment, Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Consultancy industries. He is a qualified and accredited Energy Consultant, Green Deal Assessor and Practitioner member of IEMA. Chris’s main interests range from Science and Engineering, Military and Ancient History to Politics and Philosophy.

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Google comes to life – January

Google comes to life.

Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin start a project to better organize internet search results. The duo made an algorithm that ranks pages based on the number of other pages that link back to it. They initially called their project “Backrub” but quickly change the name to Google, as a play on a mathematical symbol.

Funding arrives – August

Funding arrives.

The co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim, a Stanford alum, takes notice of Brin and Page’s idea and writes the pair a check for $100,000. It marks Google’s first investment. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is also an early investor.

Google moves off campus – September

Google moves off campus.

Armed with capital, Page and Brin move Google out of Stanford and into its first office, the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki will go on to become the CEO of YouTube, which Google owns. The company buys the domain Google.com and officially incorporates.

Hey, Pal--o Alto – March

Hey, pal--o alto.

The growing company now has eight employees and is too big for the Menlo Park garage. It moves into a real office in Palo Alto, California.

More investments arrive – June

More investments arrive.

The company touts a major investment in its first ever press release. The venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital invest $25 million.

Moving on up – August

Moving on up.

Google outgrows its Palo Alto office and moves to Mountain View, California. The new campus is just a few miles from Stanford University.

Google revolutionizes advertising – October

Google revolutionizes advertising.

Google begins selling advertising through a program called Google AdWords. It offers marketers the opportunity to purchase relevant keywords that appear next to search results. The revenue from these ad sales will help propel Google to one of the richest companies in the world.

Leadership takes shape – August

Leadership takes shape.

Eric Schmidt, who joined as chairman in March, is named Google CEO. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are named company presidents. Schmidt brings leadership experience, having served as CEO of Novell, a software company, and as a vice president at Sun Microsystems.

Google sets sights on your inbox – April

Google sets sights on your inbox.

The search company launches its webmail service, Gmail, by invitation only. The ad supported service becomes massively popular because it offers a large amount of free storage to its users. Google’s email will eventually integrate a bevy of products, including a productivity suite called Google Docs that challenges Microsoft Office for word processing dominance.

Google goes public – August

Google goes public.

In one of the most hotly anticipated tech IPOs ever, Google debuts on the Nasdaq at $85 a share. Though the price is much lower than anticipated, it values the company at a staggering $23 billion. The company’s controversial phrase “Don’t be evil” was included in its IPO filings. Brin, Page and Schmidt cut their annual salaries to $1.

Beyond the internet superhighway – April

Beyond the internet superhighway.

Google launches tools aimed at helping users navigate the real world. It starts with Google Maps, which features satellite imagery and driving directions, and follows shortly after with Google Earth, a 3-D mapping technology that offers users a way to see far flung locations on their computer monitor.

Into the Android void – July

Into the android void.

Google shells out a relatively small amount of money, roughly $50 million, to buy a struggling mobile phone software company called Android. The acquisition would turn out to be quite valuable for Google as touch screen mobile phones began to explode in popularity.

It’s time for a chat – August

It’s time for a chat.

The company debuts Google Talk, a voice and text chat program. The service, which is sometimes called Gchat, would integrate into its webmail service, Gmail, shortly after the debut.

The Great Firewall – January

The great firewall.

Google launches in China with a censored version of its search engine that adheres to Chinese government rules. The decision draws criticism from the highest levels: Sergey Brin is grilled by Congress . Four years later, Google would close up shop in China.

Google pivots to video – October

Google pivots to video.

The search giant makes a big bet on entertainment when it snaps up a popular internet video company called YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. The platform spurred a user generated content boom and helped usher in a new era of video and music stars, including acts like Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black.

Google’s ad business grows – April

Google’s ad business grows.

Google buys online advertising company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The move allows the company to quickly scale its operation beyond targeted search results. The company begins working directly with web publishers to serve display advertisements across the internet, rather than its search page.

Street View – May

Street view.

To enhance its map and navigation tools, Google straps a hulking camera to the top of a fleet of cars and sends them out film the streets. It’s called Google Street View and it’s a handy way to get a look at storefronts and streetscapes. But it also sparks privacy concerns.

Google flexes – September

Google flexes.

The company releases Chrome, a lightweight, speedy and minimalist web browser that challenges Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari. It quickly explodes in popularity. That same month Google’s Android operating system debuts on the HTC Dream phone, which was known as the G1 in the United States. The release positions Google to compete with Microsoft, Apple and Blackberry in the white hot market for mobile phones.

Nexus of the universe – January

Nexus of the universe.

Google releases its first mobile phones sold directly to customers. The Nexus One was considered sleek and revolutionary at the time because of its small size and powerful camera. Android aficionados fawned over its redesigned home screen. The phone was partnership among Google, HTC and T-Mobile.

More fiber – February

Google’s entry into distributing the internet begins with the launch of Fiber in Kansas City. The technology can produce crazy fast internet speeds.

Schmidt gives up CEO – January

Schmidt gives up ceo.

Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!  http://goo.gl/zC89p — Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) January 20, 2011

In a surprise move, Eric Schmidt steps down as CEO to become executive chairman. Co-founder Larry Page replaces him four months later. Schmidt downplayed the importance of shuffle on his Twitter account: "Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!" he wrote.

Mobile nirvana – March

Mobile nirvana.

The company’s Android operating system becomes the most-used mobile OS in the United States -- a stunning race to the top from a platform that didn't exist just 27 months prior. The astonishing rise in popularity can be credited to letting handset manufacturers customize it as much as they like.

Social reach – June

Social reach.

Google buys traffic app Waze for a reported $1.3 billion. The crowd-sourced traffic app is a crowd pleaser. Google+ launches as the replacement for its former social network Google Buzz.

Appy days – March

Google completes its $12.5 billion purchase for Motorola Mobility. The purchase is considered a watershed moment for the company, marking both its biggest acquisition and Google's transition from a search-and-software company to a consumer gadgets maker.

Face computers fizzle – April

Face computers fizzle.

Google takes the curtains off “Project Glass:” a headset with see-through lens could display everything from text messages to maps to reminders. “Google Glass” was released to a test group to help gather feedback for a public release that was eventually scrapped. The device was met with bewilderment and mockery.

Google on the TV – June

Google on the tv.

Chromecast, a $35 device for streaming content to your television, is released. While it wasn’t a revolutionary device, it competed well against Amazon Fire and Apple TV because of its low cost. It’s part of a trend toward smart home gadgets from Google.

Google sells Mobility, buys Nest – January

Google sells mobility, buys nest.

Google sells the Motorola Mobility unit it bought in 2012 to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, almost $10 billion less than what they paid. Google walked away with a lot of patents. The company also shells out $3.2 billion in cash for connected device maker Nest Lab, to start a push into the home with internet-connected video cameras, thermostats and smoke detectors.

New parent, same company – August

New parent, same company.

Google folds itself into a new company called Alphabet with Page as its CEO. The new parent company includes the businesses like Nest, Google X, Fiber and Google Ventures under its umbrella. Sundar Pichai is named Google CEO and remains in the position today.

Google’s new look – September

Google’s new look.

Google gives itself a makeover with a new streamlined logo. The color scheme remains, but creates a new font that’s easier to read on smaller screens, like mobile devices and wearables.

Okay, Google Home – May

Okay, google home.

Google enters the home assistant wars with its AI powered Google Home device. The speaker rivals the Amazon Alexa (and later the Apple HomePod) for voice control of your smart home devices and spoken queries.

Pixel comes into focus – October

Pixel comes into focus.

Google launches a flagship phone called the Pixel, billed as "first phone made by Google inside and out." The phone tries to one up Apple’s iPhone with a better camera and free, unlimited photo storage.

Leggo my Waymo – December

Leggo my waymo.

Google X spins off of its self-driving tech company to form Waymo, a current leader in self driving vehicles. The move positions it for a bitter rivalry with Uber that ends in a court approved settlement. Uber paid $245 million after being accused of stealing trade secrets.

Big fine from Europe – June

Big fine from europe.

European Union slaps Google with a record $2.7 billion antitrust fine, a whopping penalty for favoring its own shopping service in search results. It’s the first of two antitrust cases the EU wages against Google. The other case says its Android operating system muscles out the competition. Google denies both accusations.

Google buys HTC – September

Google buys htc.

After years of working closely with the hardware manufacturer, Google finally buys HTC. It pays $1.1 billion to get its hands on smartphone expertise from the struggling Taiwanese manufacturer of its Nexus phones. The move signals that Google is serious about developing cell phone hardware.

Alphabet scoop – February

Alphabet scoop.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reports that it topped $100 billion in annual sales for the first time in Google's 20-year history. The milestone is a testament to the strength of Google's ad sales business.

More troubles in Europe – July

More troubles in europe.

The EU punishes Google with another record fine. This time it’s hit with $5 billion for unfairly pushing its Android apps on smartphone users and thwarting competitors. The company refuted the claim, saying in a statement that Android “has created more choice for everyone, not less.”

​Expanding beyond Silicon Valley – December

​expanding beyond silicon valley.

Google announces it will add 1.7 million square feet of office space in New York for more than 7,000 additional employees. The company says it is growing faster outside the San Francisco Bay area than in it, opening offices and data centers in Detroit, Los Angeles, Boulder, Colorado, Tennessee and Alabama.

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Published December 13, 2018

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• Introduction

Early investment, rapid growth, and a 2004 IPO

Strategic acquisitions and monetizing google’s search engine.

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Google is an American search engine company, founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page . Since 2015, Google has been a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet, Inc . More than 70% of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. It is one of the world’s most prominent brands . Its headquarters are in Mountain View , California .

Google began as an online search firm, but it now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from e-mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers . In addition, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put the company in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high-tech marketplace, along with Apple , IBM , and Microsoft . Despite its myriad of products, the original search tool remains the core of Google’s success. In 2023, Alphabet took in $175 billion in revenue (57% of all Google revenue) from advertising based on users’ search requests.

How to Write Your Biography on Google

Having your biography published on Google is easier than you might think. Writing your own biography is called an autobiography. When someone else writes your life story, it's a biography. So technically, any biography you write about yourself would be an autobiography, not a biography. Technicalities aside, having your biography picked up by Google will give you worldwide exposure.

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Begin by writing your life story in your word processing program. Web readers like short paragraphs, so make sure that each of your paragraphs has between 100 and 200 words for easy readability.

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Compile pictures into a folder and name them appropriately. "Jimsfirsttooth.jpg" is a more descriptive--and therefore better--name than "img-27.jpg."

Publish your biography on one of the many available self-publishing websites such as Google Knols or bukisa.com (see Resources).

Create an account on Google-owned blogspot.com. Here you can customize your layout and graphics more so than on other sites (see Resources).

Submit the URL (Web address) to the Google search engine. You might also want to submit it to the DMOZ biography section, because when people visit the Google Biography reference, it shows DMOZ results (see Resources).

Wait a few days for your page to be "crawled" by the search engines, then search for your name on Google. If you highlight a few specific sentences in your article and use the "copy" and "paste" function to paste it into the search engine for an exact quote, you'll probably find yourself right at the top of the Google results.

• Submit your URL to Google
• Write for Bukisa and get paid
• Submit your URL to DMOZ
• Publish on Google Knols

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