Google is founded, transforming online search
- Date
- 4 September 1998
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- United States
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 4 September 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University PhD students, incorporated Google, building on a research project begun in 1996 known as BackRub.
Their key innovation was the PageRank algorithm, which ranked web pages by analysing the structure of links between them, treating links as votes of relevance. This produced dramatically more useful search results than competing engines that relied largely on keyword matching, at a moment when the rapidly growing Web was becoming difficult to navigate. Backed by early investment, including a $100,000 cheque from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the company grew quickly from a Menlo Park garage into the dominant gateway to online information. Google later built a vast advertising business around search, and expanded into email, mapping, mobile operating systems, video, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. By organising the world's information and making it searchable, Google became one of the most influential companies of the digital age, shaping how billions of people find information, while raising lasting questions about market power, privacy and the control of online attention.
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Empires active in 4 September 1998
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Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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