Google’s Birthday: Complete story in 6 chapters:Students’ meeting, a rented garage and Shriram’s trust

Google is celebrating its 28th birthday today, 27 September. However, on paper, the company was registered on 4 September 1998. After celebrating on different dates in its early years, Google officially fixed 27 September as its birthday from 2006 to commemorate a major record in web indexing. Google’s complete story in six chapters: What would life be like without Google? Today, every question can be answered by saying, “Just Google it,” but before 1998, searching for anything could take hours. Then came Larry Page and Sergey Brin-two geniuses who turned a small project into the world’s third-largest technology company. This is their story, chapter by chapter, like an entertaining film: Chapter One-The meeting: They first met at Stanford In 1995, Larry Page, a boy from Michigan, arrived at Stanford to study computer engineering. Both his parents were computer experts, so Larry developed a fascination for machines from an early age. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was a Russian boy from Moscow. His father was a maths professor and his mother was a NASA scientist. When he was six, his family came to America to escape the persecution of Jews in Russia. Sergey Brin was already a student there. He had taken on the task of giving campus tours to new students. While he was showing Larry around, the two got into an argument as they walked through the hills of San Francisco. They did not like each other at first, but later became good friends.
Chapter 2 – Genius Idea: Google got its name by mistake Larry needed to find a topic for his PhD thesis. He decided to build a search engine for the web-one that would not just look at keywords, but rank links between pages. They named it “BackRub”, referring to ranking through backlinks. But the idea was so complex that it required computing power and mathematics. That was where Sergey came in, a maths whiz. In 1996, the two began experimenting on Stanford’s homepage. They created the “PageRank” algorithm. It determined how important each page was. This formula became the foundation of Google Search. The name was inspired by the mathematical term “googol”-one followed by 100 zeroes. While writing the name, they accidentally typed GOOGLE. It has been known as Google ever since. Chapter 3 – Funding: The First Cheque and Angel Investor Ram Shriram’s Investment Google’s office was operating out of a garage. It needed funding to expand. When the two founders approached investors for funding in 1998, they were told, “There are five search engines-why a sixth?” But Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, liked the idea. He wrote a cheque for $100,000. Angel investor Ram Shriram and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos then invested $250,000 each. This marked the beginning of Google. Its first employee was Craig Silverstein, who was selected after 12-15 rounds. Chapter 4 – The Offer: Yahoo Wanted to Buy Google, but Google Refused In 2002, Yahoo was the king of the internet world. It had everything from a search engine to email. But even though Google was still new, it was growing rapidly. In this situation, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel made Google’s founder an offer of $3 billion. Larry and Sergey knew that Google was worth more, so they made a counteroffer of $5 billion. Negotiations continued for weeks, but no agreement was reached. Larry and Sergey rejected the offer because they believed Google would become a platform for organising all the world’s information, not just a search engine. It was about the vision, not the money. In 2004, Google came out with a $27 billion IPO. Yahoo had already fallen behind. In 2008, Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo for $44 billion, but the founders rejected that offer as well. Today, Google’s market capitalisation is more than $3 trillion. Chapter 5-Product: Made email revolutionary Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s team thought they should make email revolutionary. At the time, email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo offered only 2-4 MB of storage. This meant inboxes would fill up within a few weeks, but Google launched Gmail on 1 April 2004. It offered 1 GB of free storage. Everyone thought it was a joke, but it was real. Gmail now has more than 1.8 billion users. Google Maps was launched in 2005. Today, it is the most widely used service for navigation worldwide. Android was acquired for $50 million in 2005 because Larry Page could see the future of mobile technology. At the time, Andy Rubin’s startup, Android Inc., developed an open-source mobile operating system. Today, Android is the world’s leading mobile OS. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim launched YouTube in 2005. It was a platform for sharing short videos. Seeing its future potential, Google made an offer of $1.65 billion. Microsoft, Yahoo and Viacom also bid for it, but Google won. Chapter 6 – A New Era: Alphabet and Stepping Back 2012 proved to be a difficult year for Larry Page. He developed a condition called vocal cord paralysis, which caused his voice to weaken and made speaking extremely difficult. He began skipping conference calls and press events. Amid this challenge, Larry and Sergey Brin made a major structural change in 2015. Alphabet Inc. was created as Google’s parent company, so that Google would not remain limited to being a search engine but could expand into new fields such as healthcare, energy and self-driving cars. Larry Page became Alphabet’s CEO, Sergey Brin its president, and Sundar Pichai was appointed Google’s CEO. Then came the turning point in 2019-Larry and Sergey stepped back completely. Sundar Pichai was also made Alphabet’s CEO. Both founders moved away from day-to-day operations. The decision was natural-after 20 years of hard work, they were now handing over to the next generation. Alphabet is now a company valued at more than $4 trillion. Pichai has made it a leader in cloud computing, AI and quantum computing. Overall, Larry and Sergey made Google not just a company but an ecosystem that is changing the world.