Google Marks 28 Years of Innovation: From Search to AI

Google is celebrating its 28th birthday on September 27, 2026. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University, who began developing a search engine project called BackRub in the late 1990s.

The project used a ranking system called PageRank to organize web pages based on links and relevance. In August 1998, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 cheque to Page and Brin, marking the formal beginning of Google Inc., which was incorporated on September 4, 1998.

The name 'Google' comes from the mathematical term 'googol', representing the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Since then, Google has expanded far beyond search, launching Gmail in 2004 with 1 GB of free storage, Google Maps in 2005, and YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.

Today, Google's ecosystem includes email, maps, online video, mobile software, and web browsing, among other services. The company has also become a leader in artificial intelligence, with projects like BERT and Gemini, which can handle different types of information and support tasks such as reasoning, coding, and content creation.