20/05/2025
It all began with a question — how do you organize the chaos of the internet?
In 1996, two PhD students at Stanford University — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — started working on a research project. The internet was growing, but it was messy, cluttered, and unsearchable. Existing search engines worked like directories, ranking pages by how often they used a keyword. But Larry and Sergey had a better idea.
They called it Backrub.
It analyzed backlinks — how websites linked to one another — to determine which pages were truly important. The logic was simple: if a page was linked to by many others, it must be valuable. They turned that insight into an algorithm. PageRank was born. It changed everything.
In 1998, they renamed it Google — a play on "googol," the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Their goal? To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
They set up shop in a friend's garage in Menlo Park. Early users were stunned. Google was clean, fast, and eerily accurate. Word spread. Investors noticed. In 1999, they raised $25 million. The tech world was waking up.
By 2000, Google had indexed over a billion pages — more than any other engine. Yahoo, Excite, and AltaVista were left scrambling. And in a bold move, Google refused to clutter its homepage with ads. Simplicity was power.
Then came the money.
In 2003, Google launched AdWords — text-based ads triggered by search terms. It was brilliant. Ads were now relevant, useful, and profitable. Suddenly, Google wasn’t just a search engine. It was a goldmine.
In 2004, Google went public. Shares soared. Page and Brin became billionaires overnight. But they weren’t done.
They acquired YouTube in 2006 — a bold $1.65 billion bet that user-generated video was the future. People laughed. Today, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine.
They launched Google Maps, Gmail, Chrome, and Android. Phones. Browsers. Navigation. Email. Google wasn’t just part of the internet — it was the internet.
But every rise meets resistance.
In the 2010s, regulators came knocking. Accusations of monopolistic behavior. Privacy violations. Biased search results. Fines from the EU. Scrutiny in the U.S. People began to ask: had Google gotten too big?
Internally, tensions grew. Project Maven — a military AI contract — triggered employee protests. Others left, citing ethical concerns around surveillance, facial recognition, and data collection. "Don’t be evil," once their motto, started to sound ironic.
Still, Google pressed on.
In 2015, they restructured. Alphabet Inc. became the parent company. Google was now just one piece of a tech empire. Other bets included Waymo (self-driving cars), DeepMind (AI research), Verily (health science), and Calico (longevity).
And then came AI.
In 2017, a research paper dropped: Attention Is All You Need. From it came the transformer architecture — the foundation of modern AI. Google researchers had quietly sparked a revolution. BERT, LaMDA, PaLM — names that would change how machines understood language.
But in 2022, something unexpected happened.
OpenAI released ChatGPT. The world was wowed. Google, suddenly, seemed behind. Panic spread in Mountain View. A “code red” was declared. Google scrambled to catch up — launching Bard, investing billions into AI, merging DeepMind and Brain into Google DeepMind.
By 2024, the AI arms race was in full swing. Google wasn’t out — far from it. Its models were powerful. Its data vast. Its influence undeniable. But it was no longer alone.
Today, Google is everywhere.
It finishes your sentences, finds your memories, recommends your videos, drives your car, and powers your phone. Billions of people rely on it every day — often without thinking. It watches, learns, predicts. It knows what you want before you do.
But it all started in a dorm room. With two students. A problem. And a belief: that the internet could be more useful, more intelligent, more human.
The story of Google isn’t just about search. It’s about vision. Reinvention. And power. It’s about how two minds reshaped how the world thinks, learns, and communicates.
And even now, after reshaping the web and igniting the AI revolution — Google is still searching.