Google is 27 years old, founded on September 4, 1998, which makes it younger than the World Wide Web it helped organize and older than most of the smartphones people use to search it. The company was built by two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who started it as a research project before it became the front door to the internet. The history below covers the founding date, the founders, the original name, the IPO, and the corporate restructuring that turned Google into a subsidiary of Alphabet.
Key Takeaways
- Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, making it 27 years old in 2026.
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google while they were PhD students at Stanford University.
- The search engine began in January 1996 as a research project originally called BackRub.
- Google went public on August 19, 2004, raising $1.67 billion in its initial public offering.
- Since August 10, 2015, Google has operated as the largest subsidiary of parent company Alphabet Inc.
- The name Google is a play on googol, the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- Google has celebrated its birthday on September 27 since 2002, a different date from its actual incorporation.
How Old Is Google? The Direct Answer
Google is 27 years old as a company, dating to its incorporation on September 4, 1998, according to Google’s corporate record. That is the legal birthday, the day Google Inc. became a registered company in California. Count from that incorporation date and the answer is unambiguous: Google has been a company for 27 years.
The age gets slightly more complicated because Google marks its anniversary on a different day than it was incorporated. The encyclopedic record, per Wikipedia, shows that since 2002, the company has celebrated its anniversaries on various days in September, most frequently on September 27. The celebrated birthday and the incorporation date are nearly a month apart, so depending on which milestone you anchor to, “Google’s birthday” lands in early or late September.
Key context: Google’s candidate “birthdays” sit within a few years of each other, according to Wikipedia and IEEE records. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, yet it has celebrated its anniversaries on various days in September, most frequently on September 27, and the search engine itself dates to a 1996 Stanford research project. The age you cite depends on which milestone you treat as the start.
The question has more than one answer for a second reason: the search engine is older than the company itself. We track that gap in our Google Search Statistics coverage, where the product people use every day predates the corporation that now sells it.
When Was Google Founded?
Google was founded on September 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, California. The incorporation followed a now-famous early investment. In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. was officially born, according to Google’s own account of its founding.
That check did more than seed the company. With the investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki. The garage origin became Silicon Valley legend, and Wojcicki went on to run YouTube, the video platform Google would later acquire.
The founding year places Google in a specific moment of internet history. It launched after the early search engines of the mid-1990s, and just before the dot-com peak, which means its first office opened roughly a year before the market it would eventually dominate began to take shape.
The first months of the incorporated company were spent in that Menlo Park garage, building out the search index and attracting the first round of outside interest from Silicon Valley investors. Google outgrew the garage within the year. By 1999 the team had relocated to Palo Alto, and by 2003 it had moved to the Mountain View campus it still occupies today. The legal incorporation date of September 4, 1998, marks the moment the partnership became a company, but the operational footprint expanded quickly in the years that followed.
Who Founded Google?
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while they were both PhD students at Stanford University. The two met before they built anything. The founding narrative, according to Google, says the story begins in 1995 at Stanford University, when Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around.
The partnership formed the following year. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine how individual web pages ranked against each other. The mechanism, according to IEEE History Center records, was new: the PageRank algorithm ranked web pages by the number and quality of links pointing to them, rather than by the number of times a search term appeared on a page. That link-based method was the technical idea that separated Google from the keyword-matching engines that came before it.
Both founders stayed at the helm for the company’s first two decades before stepping back into oversight roles. Their early decisions still shape products people rely on daily, and that reach now extends across the Android Operating System and far beyond.
What Was Google Originally Called? BackRub and PageRank
Google was originally called BackRub. Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine BackRub because the system checked backlinks to gauge how each page stacked up. The name described exactly what the software did: it read the “back links” pointing at a page to judge how that page ranked.
The research that powered BackRub began earlier than the company. In 1996, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin began collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its analysis of the web’s back links. The algorithm behind it earned its own name and its own place in computing history. Page and Brin developed the PageRank algorithm to rank web pages by the number and quality of links pointing to them, rather than by the number of times a search term appeared on a page.
Key finding: PageRank, the link-analysis algorithm behind BackRub, was recognized as an IEEE Milestone for 1996-1998. Its approach to relevance ranking became the foundation of the Google search engine and had a profound impact on both academia and industry, according to the IEEE History Center.
The name changed once the project outgrew the dorm room. Backrub was renamed Google, a play on the mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The spelling was a riff on googol, and it signaled the founders’ ambition to index a near-infinite web.
Google’s Company History Timeline
Google’s history compresses into a short timeline that runs from a campus meeting to one of the largest companies on earth. The table below maps the milestones that define the company’s age, from the 1996 research project through the 2015 restructuring that created Alphabet.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1995 | Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford University |
| 1996 | BackRub search engine and the PageRank algorithm begin as a research project |
| 1998 | Andy Bechtolsheim writes a $100,000 check; Google is incorporated on September 4 |
| 2004 | Google goes public on August 19 in a $1.67 billion IPO |
| 2015 | Google reorganizes under new parent company Alphabet Inc. on August 10 |
Source: Google (about.google), IEEE History Center, Wikipedia
Each milestone answers a slightly different version of “how old is Google.” The search engine is the oldest piece, the incorporated company is younger, and the Alphabet-era corporate structure is the youngest layer. For a sense of how far the product has traveled since 1996, our Google usage data showing how the world uses Google today sits at the other end of that timeline.
When Did Google Go Public?
Google went public on August 19, 2004, when it became a public company via an initial public offering. The offering itself was unusually structured for its time. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share, sold through an online auction system rather than the traditional bank-allocated process.
The numbers turned Google from a well-funded startup into a public-market heavyweight overnight. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
By the numbers: Google’s 2004 IPO listed under the ticker GOOGL, sold 19,605,052 shares at $85 each, and raised $1.67 billion, valuing the six-year-old company at more than $23 billion on its first day of public trading, per Google’s IPO filings.
The IPO came when Google was just under six years old as an incorporated company, a fast path from a Menlo Park garage to a multibillion-dollar listing. The workforce that built it has grown enormously since; our breakdown of Google’s global workforce headcount tracks how far the company has scaled past those two founders.
Is Google Owned by Alphabet?
Google is owned by Alphabet Inc. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc., and Google became Alphabet’s largest subsidiary. The reorganization separated Google’s core internet business from the company’s more experimental ventures.
The restructuring also changed who ran Google day to day. Upon completion of the restructuring, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Page, who became CEO of Alphabet. That handoff means the company most people call “Google” has, since age 17, technically been a subsidiary rather than a standalone corporation.
The practical effect of the restructuring on day-to-day operations is limited: the products, employees, and engineering remain under the Google brand, and the search advertising business still generates the vast majority of Alphabet’s revenue. The Alphabet layer adds a governance and accountability framework that separates Google’s internet core from higher-risk projects like Waymo (self-driving vehicles) and Verily (life sciences), which report as standalone Alphabet subsidiaries rather than Google divisions. The structure means investors can evaluate the search business independently from the speculative ventures.
The Alphabet umbrella now covers far more than search. Products that grew up inside Google, from the YouTube video platform to cloud services and self-driving research, all report up through the same parent company that took shape in 2015.
How old is Google’s search engine compared to the company?
Google’s search engine is about two years older than the company. The search technology began as the BackRub research project in 1996, while Google was not incorporated until September 4, 1998. Counting from the 1996 research start, the search engine is roughly three decades old, a couple of years ahead of the incorporated company.
Where is Google’s headquarters?
Google is headquartered at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. The Googleplex name combines “Google” with “complex,” and the campus spans more than two million square feet of office space. It sits roughly 35 miles south of San Francisco, in the heart of Silicon Valley, which made it a natural landing spot for a company that grew out of the Stanford University research environment just a few miles away.
The company started in the rented garage in Menlo Park in 1998 before settling at its Mountain View campus, which remains Alphabet’s main base of operations today. The browser, search, and advertising products run from there shape much of the web browser market share tracked across the industry.
Conclusion
Google is 27 years old, founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, though the search engine that carries its name dates to a 1996 Stanford research project called BackRub. The company’s age looks simple until you notice the candidate birthdays and the 2015 restructuring that folded Google into Alphabet, turning a standalone corporation into the largest subsidiary of a conglomerate.
For readers, the practical answer holds steady: count from incorporation, and Google has been a company for 27 years. The next chapters of that history will be written under the Alphabet structure, where search remains the anchor product even as the parent company spreads across cloud computing, AI, and hardware.
