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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 4, 1998
Menlo Park, California, USA
28 years ago
Google, incorporated on September 4, 1998, by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which grew from a research project into the dominant search engine in the world.
On September 4, 1998, two Stanford graduate students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed the paperwork incorporating Google Inc. They set up in a garage in Menlo Park rented from a friend, Susan Wojcicki, who would later run YouTube. Their working capital included a check for one hundred thousand dollars written by the Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, made out to a company that did not yet legally exist when he wrote it.
The idea behind the company came from a research project the two had been working on since 1996, originally called BackRub. Existing search engines ranked results largely by counting how often a search term appeared on a page, an approach that was easy to manipulate and produced poor results. Page and Brin's insight was that the link structure of the web itself carried information about quality. A page linked to by many other pages, especially by pages that were themselves widely linked, was probably more useful. The algorithm they built on this idea was called PageRank.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The search engine, the technology that organizes and retrieves information from the web, which Google's ranking approach transformed and came to dominate.
The product worked strikingly better than what existed, and word spread quickly. Google's spare white homepage, with almost nothing on it but a search box, stood in deliberate contrast to the crowded portal pages of its competitors, who were trying to keep users on their sites rather than send them elsewhere. Google's proposition was the opposite: find what you want and leave. Users responded, and the company grew rapidly without conventional advertising.
The business model arrived in 2000 with AdWords, which sold small text advertisements matched to search terms and charged advertisers when users clicked. It proved to be one of the most profitable business models ever devised, because it delivered advertising to people at the moment they had declared what they were looking for. Search advertising revenue funded an expansion into email, maps, video, mobile operating systems, cloud computing, web browsers, and artificial intelligence research.
Google reorganized itself under a holding company called Alphabet in 2015 and has become one of the most valuable companies in the world. It has also become one of the most scrutinized. Regulators in the United States and Europe have brought antitrust cases over its dominance in search and advertising. Its collection of personal data has driven decades of privacy debate. Its role as the default gateway to information has raised questions about who decides what people find. A ranking algorithm written by two graduate students became infrastructure that billions of people depend on daily.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It changed how people find information. Ranking pages by the structure of links rather than keyword frequency produced results good enough that searching the web became a routine act rather than a frustrating one, and the phrase to google entered the language as a verb.
It created one of the most profitable business models ever built. Search advertising delivers messages to people at the moment they state what they want. The revenue from that insight funded expansion into email, maps, video, mobile operating systems, and artificial intelligence.
It concentrated enormous power over access to knowledge. A single company's ranking decisions shape what billions of people see, which has made Google a permanent subject of antitrust enforcement, privacy regulation, and public argument about who controls information.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On September 4, 1998, two graduate students incorporated a company built around the idea that links between web pages reveal which pages are worth reading. They worked out of a rented garage. The company they founded became the front door to the internet for billions of people and one of the most valuable and most investigated businesses in the world.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”
— Larry Page, describing Google's ambition
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Google's founding, the PageRank idea behind it, the advertising model that funded its growth, and the scrutiny it now faces?
