On September 4, 1998, two Stanford graduate students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin signed a piece of paper that officially turned their search-engine experiment into a real company called Google. Within weeks they moved out of their dorm rooms and rented a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The garage belonged to a young woman named Susan Wojcicki, who would later become the CEO of YouTube. The company was officially incorporated on September 26, 1998, and its first office was full of beanbag chairs, a ping pong table, and a single fridge.
The name Google came from a math word, googol, which means a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Larry and Sergey picked it because they wanted their search engine to organize an almost infinite amount of information. Their big idea was a system called PageRank, which sorted web pages by how many other trusted pages linked to them, like a giant popularity vote. The result was way better than other search engines of the time, and word spread quickly among college students.
From that small garage, Google grew into one of the biggest companies in history. It now answers more than 8.5 billion searches every single day in over 100 languages. It owns YouTube, runs the Android operating system on more than three billion phones, and builds self-driving cars called Waymo that you can hail in some cities like a taxi. The little ping pong garage is still around, kept by Google as a kind of museum, a reminder that even a giant company can start with two friends and a borrowed table.
