Google Turns 28: A Look at its Journey from Humble Beginnings to Tech Giant

Google celebrates its 28th birthday on September 27, 2026, marking two decades since it was restructured into Alphabet Inc.

The company's journey began in the late 1990s when Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin started developing a search engine project called BackRub. The project used PageRank to organise web pages by examining links and relevance.

In August 1998, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 cheque to Page and Brin, which marked the formal beginning of Google Inc., incorporated on September 4, 1998. The name 'Google' was derived from 'googol', a mathematical term for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Over time, Google expanded its product portfolio beyond search with Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. In 2015, Alphabet Inc. became the parent company of Google, separating the core internet businesses from other ventures within the group.