Google is celebrating its 25th anniversary today. On September 27, 1998, the founders, PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, established their operational base, Google’s first office, in a rented garage.
The two had met in a computer science class at Stanford University and discovered they shared a vision to make the World Wide Web a more accessible place. Before arriving at the garage, the two worked tirelessly from their dorms to develop a prototype for a better search engine.
There is a long discussion about the “date of birth” of Google. In the past, Google has celebrated its birthday on other dates, sometimes on September 4, the day the company was incorporated in 1998, sometimes on September 7, which is the date the company was actually founded. The 27th itself may also date from the date that Page and Brin, still students, first described their new search engine project in a publication.
But how was the most used search engine on the planet born and evolved? In 1997, Page and Brin had already been developing the embryo of a tool designed to help users navigate the World Wide Web for several years. However, they wanted to graduate from Stanford first, so they first tried to sell the technology to one of the companies that allowed you to perform web searches: namely Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Excite.
For years, no one was really interested in search engines, perhaps because it was not clear how they could become a source of income. But in the meantime, Page and Brin’s invention began to have great success among researchers at Stanford, where it worked at full capacity. Convinced that no one else could help them, at a certain point the two decided to start their own business.
To find the necessary financing, they met Andy Bechtolsheim, the head of Sun Microsystems, a company that produced software and semiconductors. After just 15 minutes, Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 and gave it to them.
Page and Brin celebrated their success at Burger King, then went to the bank, deposited the amount, and from that moment began the unstoppable rise of Google. The sequel is today’s story. Year after year maps, email services, educational platforms and today artificial intelligence have been added to the search engine.
Why this name? The name Google, on the other hand, comes from googol, which simply represents a large number (1 followed by 100 zeros). The origin of this name is quite curious and dates back to 1920, when the American mathematician Edward Kasner was walking in the forest with his nephew Milton Sirotta, who asked him for a suggestion for the name to give him a surprising number. His answer was googol, a term which became famous only twenty years later, when Kasner mentioned it in the book “Mathematics and Imagination”.