Google Turns 28: From Humble Beginnings to Global Tech Ecosystem

Google is celebrating its 28th birthday on September 27, marking another year since Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search engine in 1998.

The company has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a research project to organize information on the World Wide Web. 'BackRub,' the initial name, was later changed to Google, inspired by 'googol,' the mathematical term for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.

After receiving an initial $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim in September 1998, Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4 of that year.

The company's expansion accelerated after its initial public offering in 2004, when it launched Gmail with 1 GB of free storage and introduced Google Maps in 2005, adding an online mapping and navigation service to the growing portfolio.