TODAY MARKS 26 YEARS SINCE GOOGLE.COM WAS REGISTERED

Fri 15 September 2023:

Lawrence Page, 22, and Sergey Brin, 21, had never met before at Stanford University’s department of computer science, and they didn’t get along well at all.

After graduating from Michigan University, Page had just started at Stanford for a PhD in computer science, and Brin, who was also enrolled in a PhD program, was in charge of showing him around the school.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

As 1995 passed and 1996 arrived, a partnership between Page and Brin was formed that changed the course of history. Together, the duo had developed BackRub, an algorithm that crawled the web to understand its mathematical hierarchy and rank the web pages according to the number of the reputed links directed at them. The search engine got the name Google from the mathematical term “googol” which refers to one followed by 100 zeroes.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

On September 15, 1997, Page and Brin registered a domain name for their search engine. Before this, their search engine was eating up most of Stanford’s bandwidth. The new domain name was Google.com. In August 1998, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems — a computer hardware and software company that was facing market competition at the time — Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 cheque to Google, a company that did not exist at the time.

On September 4, Page and Brin got the company registered in California and opened a bank account in the newly registered company’s name to make use of Bechtolsheim’s cheque.

They set up the new company’s office in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in California. Wojcicki went on to become Google’s marketing manager the following year and is now YouTube’s CEO. From there Google went on a journey of rapid growth to become one of the biggest tech giants in the world.

Google celebrates September 15 as its “domain-iversary,” marking the beginning of a remarkable journey that has hardly left anyone untouched from its significance.

Google now provides a variety of services in addition to its main search engine, including cloud-based productivity tools like Docs, Sheets, and Slides and the manufacturing of smartphones like the Pixel. Google has made a major contribution to the study of and advancements in software and artificial intelligence. The IT giant just made a significant advancement in quantum computing.