From Backrub to Google, milestones on the road to a global empire
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in 1995 at Stanford University when Brin was considering whether or not to attend grad school there. Page was tasked with showing him around and they disagreed about nearly everything. But the next year, they formed a partnership that led to the creation of a search engine in their dorms. What was formerly called Backrub, a search engine that scoured the internet and ranked pages based on importance, was later named Google.
By August 1998, they had $100,000 from co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim and left the dorms for a garage in Menlo Park, California. Google Inc. got its official start. Susan Wojcicki, who later went on to lead YouTube, which Google eventually acquired, owned the garage and became Google's 16th employee. Google's initial public offering when it became a publicly traded company happened in 2004, and several more big business moves have been made since. The company created Gmail, the Android phone and acquired YouTube, to name a few.
One thing that has been consistent with the ever-changing company Google Doodles. The homepage logo has been turned into "doodles" since 1998, when Google marked the Burning Man Festival in Nevada with a doodle that looked like the wooden man burned at the festival. In 2015, the Google logo got a new font. That same year, Page announced Alphabet would become Google's holding company. Google remained the search engine, and Alphabet is the parent of all the company's ventures, such as Waymo, the self-driving car company. Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google. In 2019, Pichai also became CEO of Alphabet when Page stepped down and so did Brin as president.
