It's from 1998, before you were born.
- Maker
- Larry Page & Sergey Brin
- Type
- Search engine
- Debuted
- 1998
- Note
- Started in a Stanford dorm and a garage
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About
As of 2026, it's 28 years old.
Google launched in 1998 as a suspiciously clean white page in an era of cluttered web portals, then proceeded to organize the entire internet for fun and profit. Its secret was PageRank, an algorithm that decided a page mattered based on how many other pages pointed to it, which turned out to be a very good idea.
Within a few years the company name became a verb, and 'just Google it' replaced the phrase 'I don't know.' Few products go from dorm-room project to dictionary entry that fast.
Google is the search box that swallowed the world's questions and somehow always had an answer, even for the ones you were embarrassed to ask.
Google through the years
Launch
Page and Brin incorporate Google out of a rented garage.
Goes public
An IPO turns the search engine into a tech titan.
Becomes a verb
Merriam-Webster officially adds 'google' to the dictionary.
