Google at 28: From BackRub to a Global Tech Empire
News Desk
From a small research project at Stanford University to a technology ecosystem used around the world, Google’s journey has transformed the way people search for information, communicate, navigate, watch videos and interact with digital services.
Google is marking its 28th birthday on September 27, 2026, with a special Doodle reflecting on the company’s early years and the remarkable expansion that followed.
The story traces back to the late 1990s, when Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began experimenting with a new approach to internet search. Their project, initially called BackRub, focused on analysing the relationships between webpages and the links connecting them.
At the centre of their work was PageRank, an algorithm that assessed the significance of webpages by examining their links and their relevance. The approach offered a different way of organising the rapidly expanding information available on the web.
The Stanford project soon developed into a business venture. Google Inc. was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998. Just weeks earlier, in August, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim had written a $100,000 cheque to Page and Brin, providing an important early boost to their plans.
The name Google was inspired by “googol”, the mathematical term for the number one followed by 100 zeros. It reflected the scale of information the founders envisioned organising through their search technology.
While September 4 is the company’s incorporation date, Google later selected September 27 for its annual birthday celebration.
Search remained at the heart of Google’s growth, but the company gradually moved into almost every major corner of digital technology. Gmail expanded its presence in online communication, Google Maps became a widely used navigation service, YouTube developed into a global video platform, and Android turned Google into a major force in mobile computing.
Artificial intelligence has now emerged as another defining chapter. With its Gemini AI family, Google is increasingly integrating generative AI into its products and services, extending its reach beyond traditional search.
The evolution from BackRub to today’s Google represents a dramatic expansion in both technology and ambition. What started as an effort by two Stanford researchers to improve web search has grown into an ecosystem covering information, communication, navigation, entertainment, mobile technology and artificial intelligence.
At 28, Google’s history is ultimately a story of expansion: an idea designed to organise the web became a platform that has played a major role in shaping how people access and use information in the digital age.
