Google marks its birthday

Google started as a research project at Stanford University in January 1996. Two graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, worked with Scott Hassan on a way to rank web pages by the links pointing to them, an idea that became the PageRank algorithm. The project was first known as BackRub and ran from Stanford’s own website. It was later renamed Google, a misspelling of “googol,” the number written as a one followed by 100 zeros, chosen to suggest the enormous amount of information the engine meant to search. The google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997.

The company itself came together in the late summer of 1998. In August, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to a corporation that did not yet exist, which pushed the founders to make it official. Page and Brin incorporated Google on September 4, 1998, and set up shop in the Menlo Park garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki. By the end of that year, the search engine had indexed about 60 million pages, and its home page still carried a “BETA” label.

Choosing a birthday turned out to be harder than founding the company. Starting in 2002, Google celebrated its anniversary on several different days in September, including the 7th, 8th, 26th, and 27th. According to reports at the time, the date sometimes moved so that the party could coincide with the announcement of a record index size. Google’s own company history admitted that the date had “moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.” Over time, September 27 became the date the company used most often, and its birthday Doodles have appeared on that day in recent years, including the one for its 28th anniversary in 2026.

Why it matters

Few companies have reshaped everyday life as much as Google. The project that left a borrowed garage became the most used search engine on the web, grew into a vast range of products from Gmail to Maps, and in 2015 became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet.

The wandering birthday is a small but telling detail. It shows a young company that treated its own history with a sense of play, and it explains why searches for Google’s founding date can return more than one answer. The legal record points to September 4, 1998, while the public celebration belongs to September 27.

Did you know?

The first Google Doodle appeared in 1998, before the company had a fixed birthday. Page and Brin designed it to honor the Burning Man festival, as a way of telling users they were away in case the servers crashed.