Google Turns 26: From Garage Startup to Global Tech Giant

Google Turns 26: From Susan Wojcicki's Garage To Mountain View, The Journey Of Tech Giant - News18

Larry Page and Sergey Brin learnt the concept of information retrieval before developing the first Google search engine. Tech giant Google turned 26 on Wednesday, September 4. It was in 1998 when two PhD students - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - established the business in a small garage in Menlo Park. More than two decades later, Google has now become a constant companion for many internet users. The journey started in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who earlier served as the CEO of YouTube and died last month after battling cancer for a prolonged period. Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented Wojcicki's garage to open their business. They used to pay a monthly rent of $1,700 for the space. The parent company has been renamed Alphabet with the Google search engine being a subsidiary of it. Impressed by the business idea, Wojcicki later joined Page and Brin as the marketing manager of their start-up in 1999. In the early days, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to learn the concept of information retrieval. The duo then decided to develop a search engine and it was only meant for organising data available on the internet. Their idea impressed many technology enthusiasts and a lot of investors shifted their focus to Google. Thanks to financial aid, Page and Brin opened a new office at Mountain View in California and the rest is history. The name '"Google" is now not only limited to a search engine. The tech behemoth has taken over the other sectors as well. Apart from linking up with the Android operating system, Google currently has its own mail service (Gmail), cloud storage, photo gallery as well as a video streaming platform. The company has also started working on artificial intelligence (AI) and has already made significant progress in this regard. The journey of Google might have started on September 4 but the company celebrates its anniversary every year on September 26. "Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, but for more than a decade we've celebrated our birthday on September 27, with an annual Doodle, of course," it said earlier in a blog post. Google logged an annual revenue of 305.63 billion U.S. dollars last year and those earnings were mostly generated by advertisements on different platforms.

Google's journey to world dominance began in this Menlo Park garage 26 years ago

Internet powerhouse Google turns 26 today. Founded on September 4, 1998, by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it revolutionised how we access and communicate information. What started as a small business in a garage has grown into one of the most influential tech companies in the world, impacting almost every aspect of modern life. From its humble beginnings in the garage of Susan Wojcicki - the former CEO of YouTube who died last month after battling cancer - Google has grown into a giant, controlling more than 90 per cent of the global search engine market. Today, it is hard to imagine a day without "Googling" something, as the company's name has become synonymous with online searches. (Also Read: Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies after cancer battle, Sundar Pichai leads tribute) Like many Silicon Valley success stories, Google started in a small garage in Menlo Park, California. Both Page and Brin were fascinated by information retrieval and decided to build a search engine that was better at organising web data than anything else at the time. This new venture quickly gained attention, attracting investors and technology enthusiasts. Within a year, the company moved to Mountain View, California, and the rest, as they say, is history. Over the past 26 years, Google has grown into a tech behemoth, expanding far beyond its original search engine. From email services like Gmail to cloud computing and the Android operating system, the company has transformed how we use the internet. Google's innovations include advancements in artificial intelligence, advertising, and much more.

Google celebrates its birthday on September 27, so what makes September 4 special for the company - Times of India

Google celebrates its birthday on September 27 every year, so what makes September 4 special for the company? September 4 is the day when Google was incorporated. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, at a garage in Menlo Park, CA, by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company in fact celebrated its birthday on September 4 for 7 years after which it was moved to September 27. The decision to move Google's birthday from September 4 to September 27 was to mark the day when the company indexed a record number of search pages. Google reportedly wanted its birthday to coincide with indexing a record number of pages, solidifying its position as a leading search destination. This year, Google will be celebrating its 26th birthday. And since then there is no disputing the fact that Google reinvented the way the world searches and use information. The company has a whole host of apps and tools that many consumers use on a daily basis, from its search engine and Gmail to Google Drive, its file storage service Google Cloud. Google renamed itself Alphabet in 2015, making Google a subsidiary. In a blog post announcing the move, founder Larry Page said that the new entity would help the company take a long-term view and improve the "transparency and oversight" of its actions. The new entity, he wrote, was an "alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return over benchmark), which we strive for!" Alphabet. "G Is for Google." The 'garage success story' Coming to the famous garage story, in the year 1998, Page and Brin decided to turn their research project into a full-fledged company. They rented a garage in Menlo Park, California, from Susan Wojcicki (who would later become the CEO of YouTube) and started working on their search engine, which they initially called Backrub. The garage served as the company's headquarters for the first few months. It is said to be a humble space, filled with computers, ping pong tables, and a bright blue carpet. In 1999, Google moved out of the garage and into a larger office in Palo Alto. From there, the company continued to grow and expand, eventually becoming one of the most influential tech companies in the world. While the garage may seem like a distant memory now, it remains a symbol of Google's humble beginnings and the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled its success. "Larry and Sergey first wrote down our mission 25 years ago: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. They had an ambitious vision for a new kind of search engine to help people make sense of the waves of information moving online. The product they built, Google Search, went on to help billions of people around the world get answers to their questions," is how Google CEO Sundar Pichai described it. The TOI Tech Desk is a dedicated team of journalists committed to delivering the latest and most relevant news from the world of technology to readers of The Times of India. TOI Tech Desk's news coverage spans a wide spectrum across gadget launches, gadget reviews, trends, in-depth analysis, exclusive reports and breaking stories that impact technology and the digital universe. Be it how-tos or the latest happenings in AI, cybersecurity, personal gadgets, platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and more; TOI Tech Desk brings the news with accuracy and authenticity.