On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed the paperwork to incorporate Google Inc., turning a Stanford PhD side project into a company. The two had met a few years earlier when Brin, already a grad student, gave campus tours to prospective students like Page. Their shared interest in extracting patterns from huge, messy datasets led them to a search engine they first called BackRub, built around the idea of ranking web pages by how many other pages linked to them.
By 1997 they’d renamed the project Google, a nod to “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros — a fittingly oversized name for a company whose stated mission was to organize all of the world’s information. The incorporation in September 1998 made it official, and the fledgling company set up shop in a Menlo Park garage. It didn’t take long for the outside world to notice: by December of that same year, PC Magazine had already named Google one of its “Top 100 Web Sites” for 1998, a remarkably fast turnaround for a company barely three months old.
What started as two grad students’ research project became the dominant way most of the world finds information online, and eventually the anchor of Alphabet, one of the largest companies on the planet. It’s a reminder that some of tech’s biggest empires started as unglamorous, unfunded experiments in a university lab.
Also on this day: September 4 has a habit of showing up in tech history — in 1888, George Eastman registered the “Kodak” trademark and patented his roll-film camera, kicking off the era of consumer photography.
Source: EDN
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
