Google turns 28: from a garage in Stanford to the world's search engine

Today, 27 September 2026, Google turns 28. Not on its official incorporation date (4 September 1998), but on the date the company itself has celebrated since 2006 — originally chosen to mark a record for the number of pages indexed on the web. It is a distinction that says a lot about how Google thinks: less about paperwork, more about real milestones.

It all starts with a crawler called BackRub

In 1995, Larry Page arrived at Stanford to visit its Computer Science doctoral programme. His campus guide was Sergey Brin, a year ahead in the same programme. The two clashed at first — but by 1996 they were working together on a research project about how to rank web pages by relevance.

The initial project was called BackRub — a name derived from "backlinks", the links pointing to a destination from other pages. The premise was simple but the approach was new: the more relevant pages pointed to a site, the more important it should rank in results. That was the PageRank algorithm, which mathematically modelled the behaviour of a random reader jumping from link to link across the web.

In 1997, the project got a new name. "Google" is a play on "googol" — the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The idea was to symbolise the scale of information the engine intended to organise. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997.

The garage, the hundred-thousand-dollar cheque, and incorporation

In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, watched a demo of the search engine and wrote a cheque for US$100,000 made out to "Google Inc." — a company that did not yet formally exist. Page and Brin had to open a corporate bank account in a hurry just to cash it.

On 4 September 1998, Google Inc. was officially incorporated. The first office was the garage of Susan Wojcicki (later YouTube's CEO for nearly a decade) in Menlo Park, California — rented for US$1,700 a month. Brin and Page worked there with a handful of servers built from cheap hardware, already serving searches that stood out for their relevance.

From startup to global infrastructure: key milestones

Google's trajectory after 1998 is a sequence of bets that look obvious in hindsight, but were far from it at the time:

• 2004: IPO on 19 August, with shares at US$85. The company was valued at roughly US$23 billion on opening day. That same year, Gmail launched with 1 GB of storage — extraordinary when competitors offered 15 MB.
• 2005: Launch of Google Maps and acquisition of Android Inc. for roughly US$50 million — probably the best acquisition in tech history.
• 2006: YouTube purchased for US$1.65 billion. Widely criticised as overpriced at the time; widely regarded as a masterstroke today.
• 2008: Chrome launches. Within a decade, it would become the world's most-used browser, with around 65% market share.
• 2015: Corporate restructuring. Google becomes a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., consolidating bets on AI, health, autonomous vehicles, and infrastructure.

Google as a target: the side the company preferred to keep quiet

For years, Google projected an image of digital invulnerability. That image cracked in January 2010, when the company publicly revealed it had been the victim of a sophisticated cyberattack originating in China. The operation became known as Operation Aurora — and involved at least 34 companies compromised through a zero-day in Internet Explorer 6.

Google was the only target with the transparency to make the breach public. The decision had diplomatic costs, but set an important precedent for the industry. The technical details — the Hydraq Trojan, the targeted spear-phishing, the source code exfiltration — are covered in the post on Operation Aurora and how China hacked Google in 2010.

Since then, Google has invested heavily in security research. Project Zero, founded in 2014, is now one of the most respected vulnerability research groups in the world — responsible for discovering critical flaws in Windows, iOS, and Intel processors before attackers could exploit them at scale.

What using Google means in 2026

Today, Google processes an estimated 8.5 billion searches per day. Gmail has more than 1.8 billion active users. Chrome holds around 65% of the browser market. Android runs on more than 3 billion active devices.

That concentration creates real risks. A compromised Google account — Gmail, Drive, Photos, Pay, location history — can expose decades of digital life in a single breach. If you use Gmail as the hub of your online identity, two steps are worth taking right now: enable two-factor authentication with TOTP on Gmail and check whether your e-mail has appeared in any data breach.

In 28 years, Google went from a nameless university crawler to critical infrastructure for the global internet. The Stanford dorm became a campus of more than 250,000 square metres in Mountain View. The US$100,000 cheque became a company worth more than US$2 trillion. And BackRub — that unglamorous name — became the verb we use for any search: "I'll just Google it".