Google

• 1. Introduction

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  Google began in January 1996 as a research project by two PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They had a different idea about how a search engine should work. Conventional engines ranked results by counting how often a search term appeared on a page. Page and Brin theorized about a system that analyzed the relationships among websites instead. They called the algorithm PageRank. They first nicknamed the search engine BackRub, because it checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. The name they finally chose was a misspelling of googol, the number written as a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The BBC has called the result the most powerful company in the world. How did a project run out of a friend's garage become one of the most valuable brands on the planet? Why did its founders nearly sell it twice, and why was refusing those offers later judged a turning point? And how did a company whose unofficial slogan was Don't be evil end up fined billions and accused of running an illegal monopoly?

• 2. Garage And First Checks

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  Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a check for $100,000 in August 1998 before Google was even incorporated. That investment served as the motivation to form the company, so the founders could use the funds. Page and Brin had approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office at Stanford and had recently sold his company Granite Systems to Cisco for $220 million. Cheriton arranged a morning meeting at the front porch of his home in Palo Alto. It had to be brief, because Bechtolsheim had another meeting at Cisco at 9 a.m. Bechtolsheim tested a demo, liked what he saw, and went back to his car to grab the check.

  Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, became one of Google's angel investors in 1998. He learned about the company through Ram Shriram, who had invested $250,000 in February 1998 and knew Bezos because Amazon had acquired Junglee, where Shriram was president. Google's funding round had already formally closed when Bezos wanted in. His status as Amazon's CEO was enough to persuade Page and Brin to reopen the round. Between investors, friends, and family, Google raised around $1,000,000. That money let the founders open their first shop in Menlo Park, California, and hire fellow Stanford PhD student Craig Silverstein as the first employee.

  Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital each put in $12.5 million when a $25 million round was announced on the 7th of June 1999. Both firms were hesitant to invest jointly, since each wanted a larger share of control. Page and Brin insisted on taking money from both. The deal closed through the mediation of earlier angel investors Ron Conway and Shriram. At one point Michael Moritz of Sequoia threatened to demand immediate repayment of the $12.5 million if Google did not hire a chief executive as promised during negotiations.

• 3. The Offers They Refused

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  In 1998, Page and Brin offered to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million, and Yahoo refused. A larger chance came in 2002, when Yahoo's then CEO Terry Semel offered $3 billion to buy the company. Page and Brin reportedly held firm on a $5 billion valuation. Yahoo would not raise its offer, and the deal fell through. The move was later considered a major strategic misstep for Yahoo. The decision to keep control runs through Google's early story. Investors in 2001 felt the company needed strong internal management and agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as chairman and CEO. Schmidt, proposed by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, was not initially enthusiastic, since he was busy as CEO of Novell. As part of joining, he agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stock to show his commitment and provide funds the company needed.

• 4. Going Public

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  On the 19th of August 2004, Google became a public company through an initial public offering. Page, Brin, and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until 2024. Shares opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker GOOGL, with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at $85 each. The sale was run as an online auction using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. The $1.67 billion raised gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Shares hit $350 for the first time on the 31st of October 2007, driven by strong online advertising sales. The surge was fueled mainly by individual investors rather than large institutions.

  Google generated $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2012, after $38 billion the year before. In January 2013, then CEO Larry Page said the company ended 2012 with a strong quarter, with revenues up 36 percent year on year. He called hitting $50 billion in revenues not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. By January 2014, the market capitalization had grown to $397 billion. In September 2025, Alphabet reached a market capitalization of $3 trillion.

• 5. Buying The Future

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  YouTube cost Google $1.65 billion in stock on the 9th of October 2006, an early sign of an appetite for acquisitions. On the 11th of March 2008, Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, gaining its relationships with web publishers and advertising agencies. Motorola Mobility followed in May 2012 for $12.5 billion, the largest acquisition to that date, made partly to gain Motorola's patent portfolio and protect Android in disputes with Apple and Microsoft. Waze cost $966 million in June 2013, with its crowdsourced location features integrated into Google Maps.

  DeepMind Technologies, a privately held AI company from London, was acquired on the 26th of January 2014, reportedly for $400 million, though Google declined to confirm the price. In 2015, DeepMind's AlphaGo became the first computer program to defeat a top human professional at the game of Go. The pace of dealmaking only grew. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a cybersecurity startup founded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport and based in the U.S. and Israel, for $32 billion. That cash deal would be Google's biggest ever. Alphabet had reportedly tried to close a deal for only $23 billion in 2024, but it fell apart over regulatory concerns.

• 6. Everything Becomes A Product

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  Google Search began as the company's original service, and the company grew rapidly to offer a wide range of products. Email arrived as Gmail, mapping as Maps and Earth, and video sharing as YouTube. There is the Chrome web browser, the Android and ChromeOS operating systems, Drive for cloud storage, Translate for languages, and Photos for images. Hardware followed, including the Pixel smartphones, the Pixel Watch, and the Nest line of smart speakers. Discontinued products include the gaming service Stadia, Glass, Google+, Reader, and Hangouts.

  Google Earth, launched in 2005, let users see high-definition satellite pictures from around the world for free. The Nexus One, the first Android phone under Google's own brand, was released in January 2010, and the Nexus line ran until 2016, when it was replaced by Pixel. The Chromebook arrived in 2011, running ChromeOS. In July 2013, the Chromecast dongle let users stream content from phones to televisions. The Innovation Time Off policy shaped many of these. Engineers were encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on projects that interested them, and services such as Gmail, Google News, and AdSense originated from those independent efforts.

• 7. How The Money Works

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  Advertising supplies most of Google's revenue, a striking fact given that Page and Brin initially opposed an advertising-funded search engine. To keep an uncluttered page design, the first advertisements were solely text based. In 2011-96 percent of Google's revenue came from its advertising programs. The system rests on programs such as Google Ads, which lets advertisers display ads through a cost per click scheme, and Google AdSense, which lets website owners show those ads and earn money each time one is clicked. One criticism is click fraud, when a person or script clicks ads without real interest. Industry reports in 2006 claimed roughly 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid.

  Tax avoidance has drawn scrutiny alongside the advertising machine. Google saved $3.1 billion between 2007 and 2010 by routing non-U.S. profits through Ireland and the Netherlands and then to Bermuda. Such techniques lowered its non-U.S. tax rate to 2.3 percent, against a UK corporate rate of 28 percent at the time. In January 2016, Google reached a settlement with the UK to pay 130 million pounds in back taxes plus higher taxes in future. In 2017, it channeled $22.7 billion from the Netherlands to Bermuda. In 2020, Google said it had overhauled its global tax structure and consolidated its intellectual property holdings back to the U.S.

• 8. Monopoly And Backlash

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  Amit Mehta, a U.S. District Court judge, ruled in August 2024 that Google held an illegal monopoly over internet search, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The lawsuit, which began in 2020, alleged Google paid Apple between $8 billion and $12 billion to be the default search engine on iPhones. In September 2025, Mehta ruled that Google would not be required to divest Chrome or Android. The ruling did bar exclusive contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and Gemini, and ordered Google to share search data with competitors. European regulators reached similar conclusions. In September 2024, the Court of Justice of the EU upheld a 2.4 billion euro fine over Google's shopping search, in a case begun in 2009 by the British firm Foundem.

  Workers turned on the company too. On the 1st of November 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees and contractors staged a global walkout to protest the handling of sexual harassment complaints. CEO Sundar Pichai was reported to support the protests. Court documents later revealed that between 2018 and 2020, Google ran an anti-union campaign called Project Vivian, meant to convince employees that unions suck. The company faced its own internal disputes too. In August 2017, Google fired employee James Damore after he circulated a memo titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, which Pichai said advanced harmful gender stereotypes.

  The AI race reshaped priorities after ChatGPT. Concerned it was falling behind, Google's senior management issued a code red and a directive that all products with more than a billion users must incorporate generative AI within months. In March 2023, Google released Bard, later renamed Gemini. In 2023 it released NotebookLM, which in September 2024 gained attention for an Audio Overview feature that generates podcast-like summaries of documents. The same company that grew from a $100,000 garage check now consumed 24 TWh of electricity in 2023, more than countries such as Iceland, Ghana, or Tunisia.