Today In History: Google Is Founded

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than  starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. 

-- Larry Page, Google Founder and CEO, Foreword, xiii-xiv,  How Google Works.

One night Larry Page woke up  wondering if one could download the whole Web, just to keep the links. He and Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford University Ph.D student, realized that ranking web pages by their links could generate good search results. They immersed themselves, working steadfastly out of their dorm rooms. Their original engine, "BackRub",  checked backlinks to rate websites.  But, with growing amounts of equipment and the need for more space, they rented a garage at the Wojcicki residence in Menlo Park, California --  pursuing their dream of organizing the universe of information and making it accessible to everyone. With $100,00 in support, Google was founded on this day, September 4th, 1998.

Over the past three decades, Google has grown into a multinational technology for information technology, search engine technology, online advertising, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence. Its services include Google Maps; YouTube; Android; Gmail, GoogleDrive, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides; Google Meet and Chat; Google Scholar; Google Books; Google Calendar; Google Cloud; Google Groups; Gemini, BigQuery and much more.

Today the company's global headquarters, called Googleplex, comprises more than 2 million square feet of office space in Mountain View, California,  employing hundreds of thousands of workers in technical, business, and operational roles.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin would not only create the most popular search engine in the world -- one whose name played upon the mathematic word googol: the number 1 followed by 100 zeros -- but they would rank among the world's top wealthiest tech billionaires.

The following articles are drawn from Proquest Historical Newspapers, which informs and inspires classroom teaching and learning.

• Levy, S. (2002, Dec 16). The World According to Google.  Newsweek, 140, 46-51. 
• Sappenfield, M.  (2004, Apr 30). A Success Story That Taps Silicon Valley's Geeky Roots. The Christian Science Monitor (1908-) 
• Hansell, S., & Markoff, J. (2006, Jul 03). A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor: Software and Maybe Microchips, All Built in the Google Garage. New York Times (1923-) 
• Wray, R. (2008, Sep 06). Ten Tomorrow! Google Celebrates Birthday with Plan to Sink Microsoft: After a Decade Dominating How We Use the Web, Future of Computers Is Now at Stake. The Guardian (1959-2009) 
• Naughton, J. (2008, Sep 07). Happy Birthday Google -- Now You Can Take on the World. The Observer (1901- 2009) 
• The Great Disruption. (2009, Nov 05). Wall Street Journal (1923-) 
• Holohan, J. (2009, Nov 08). From a Garage... a Giant Is Born. The Christian Science Monitor (1908-) Retrieved from https://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/garage-giant-is-born/docview/2702531764/se-2
• Shaer, M. (2010, Sep 27). Google Celebrates Birthday with Cake: Google Rings in Its Birthday with a Cake Doodle. How Old Is Google Anyway? The Christian Science Monitor (1908-) 
• Susan Wojcicki, 56, Former YouTube Chief, Google Exec. (2024, Aug 13). Newsday (2010-) 
• January 30, 2026 (page 4D). (2026, Jan 30). USA Today (1982-) 

Tips:

• Brabazon, T. (2007). The University of Google : Education in the (Post) Information Age. Ashgate. Stacks ; LB2395.7 .B73 2007.
• Darnton, R. (2009). The Case for Books : Past, Present, Future (First edition). PublicAffairs.  e-book.
• DeAngelis, A., DeAngelis, G., & Rotolo, A. J. (2019). Google (First edition). Abdo Publishing. e-book. 
• Graham, R. (2023). Investigating Google’s Search Engine : Ethics, Algorithms, and the Machines Built to Read Us (First edition). Bloomsbury Academic.  e-book.
• Jankowski, T. A., & Medical Library Association, issuing body. (2016). Expert Searching in the Google Age. Rowman & Littlefield.  e-book.
• Marcum, D., & Schonfeld, R. C. (2021). Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization (R. C. Schonfeld, First edition). Princeton University Press. e-book.
• Palfrey, J. (2015). BiblioTech : Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google. Basic Books. e-book.
• Schmidt, E. (2014). How Google Works (First edition). Business Plus. 5th Floor Stacks & Loft ; HD9696.8.U64 G66647 2014.
• Treeves, S. Inside Google's Original Garage, 1998-Style. News from Google. September 27, 2018. 
• Weinberger, M.  33 Photos of Google's Rise from a Stanford Dorm Room to World Domination. Business Insider. October 10, 2016.

Images:

• Google Garage. Photo by Jordiipa. March 18, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
• Poster Image: Geometric Shapes in Google Colors. Canva.

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