On September 4, 1998, two Stanford University PhD students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially filed paperwork in California to incorporate a company called Google Inc. What began as an ambitious academic experiment to map the digital wilderness would soon transform into the front door of the internet and fundamentally rewrite how humanity interacts with information.

The roots of the tech giant trace back to 1996, when Page and Brin collaborated on a search engine initially called BackRub. Unlike existing directories and search portals that ranked pages simply by counting how many times a keyword appeared, their revolutionary system powered by the PageRank algorithm evaluated the importance of a website based on the quality and quantity of links pointing back to it. It was a brilliant structural shift, treating web links as academic citations of credibility.

The turning point from a university project into a commercial enterprise came in the summer of 1998. Armed with a prototype that was beginning to strain Stanford’s servers, the duo caught the attention of Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Impressed by a quick demonstration, Bechtolsheim wrote an impromptu $100,000 check made out to “Google Inc.” even though the legal entity did not yet technically exist.

That single piece of paper forced Page and Brin to formalize the business. With the funds secured, they moved their operations out of their dorm rooms and into a modest suburban garage in Menlo Park, California, generously rented out to them by Susan Wojcicki (who would later become a prominent tech executive). Operating on borrowed equipment, early servers built partly from spare parts, and an intensely minimalist homepage aesthetic, the fledgling company focused entirely on doing one thing exceptionally well: pure, unadulterated search.

The incorporation on that early September day in 1998 marked the birth of an institution. Though the digital landscape has shifted drastically over the decades expanding far beyond simple text queries into mobile operating systems, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence the core mission established in that Menlo Park garage remains unchanged: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.