Ever wonder about the actual people behind that search bar you use fifty times a day? Most of us just take it for granted. You type, it finds. But who made Google exactly? It wasn't some massive corporate committee or a government project. It was basically two guys in a messy dorm room who were obsessed with how the internet was organized. Or rather, how it wasn't organized at all back then.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the names you’ve probably heard. They met at Stanford University in 1995. Funnily enough, they didn't even like each other at first. Larry was the one showing Sergey around the campus, and they pretty much disagreed on every single topic they discussed. It’s kinda wild to think that the biggest engine of information in human history started with two guys arguing about urban planning in Palo Alto.
By 1996, they'd started collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. Yeah, BackRub. Imagine saying, "Hold on, let me BackRub that real quick." Doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? The name came from the system’s ability to analyze "backlinks" to understand how important a website was. They realized that the existing search engines—things like AltaVista and Excite—were just looking at how many times a keyword appeared on a page. It was easy to game the system. Page and Brin thought that if a lot of other reputable sites linked to you, your site must be the real deal.
The Academic Roots of Who Made Google
To understand who made Google, you have to look at the academic environment of the mid-90s. This wasn't a business venture initially. It was a research project. Larry Page was interested in the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, treating the whole thing like a massive graph. He called this PageRank. It's named after him, not the fact that it ranks web pages. Little bit of an ego move there, but it worked.
Sergey Brin, a math prodigy who had emigrated from the Soviet Union when he was six, brought the data mining expertise. Together, they realized that PageRank could transform search. They were operating out of Page's dorm room at Stanford, building a server network using cheap, off-the-shelf computers. They even built a case out of Duplo blocks because they were broke and needed a way to house a lot of hard drives in a tight space. It was the definition of "scrappy."
They eventually outgrew the dorms. The Stanford network was constantly crashing because their crawler was hogging all the bandwidth.
Stanford actually owns the patent for PageRank. In exchange for shares in the new company, the university licensed the technology to Page and Brin. This is a crucial detail because it shows how deeply embedded Google is in academic theory. It wasn't just a "cool idea"; it was a breakthrough in citation analysis applied to the digital world.
The Garage Era and Andy Bechtolsheim
By 1998, the duo was looking for investors. They weren't even sure they wanted to run a company. They actually tried to sell their technology to Yahoo! and Excite for about $1 million. Both companies passed. Can you imagine being the executive who said no to buying Google for a million bucks? That's a rough day at the office.
Since nobody wanted to buy them, they decided to make a go of it themselves. They incorporated Google Inc. on September 4, 1998. The name "Google" is a play on the word "googol," which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It represented their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information.
The first real check came from Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Legend has it he watched a quick demo on a porch, wrote a check for $100,000 made out to "Google Inc.," and then drove off in his Porsche. The problem? Google Inc. didn't legally exist yet. The check sat in Larry Page's drawer for weeks while they scrambled to get the paperwork finished and open a bank account.
With that money, they moved into Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. Susan later became the CEO of YouTube. It's a small world in Silicon Valley. They hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein, who was a fellow grad student at Stanford.
Why the Design Stays So Simple
One of the most frequent questions about who made Google involves the design. Why is it so blank? Honestly, it’s because Larry and Sergey weren't experts in HTML. They wanted something that loaded fast. At the time, every other portal was cluttered with news, weather, and horoscopes. Google was just a box. Users actually used to sit and wait for the rest of the page to load because they couldn't believe it was just that one search bar.
This minimalism became their signature. It wasn't a calculated branding move at first; it was a technical limitation that turned into a stroke of genius. It forced people to focus on one thing: search.
Scaling Up and Bringing in "Adult Supervision"
By 2001, Google was growing too fast for two twenty-somethings to handle. Their investors, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, insisted they hire an experienced CEO. This led to Eric Schmidt joining the fray. Page and Brin famously called it "adult supervision."
Schmidt helped turn the project into a global powerhouse. While the founders focused on the "moonshots" and the core tech, Schmidt handled the infrastructure, the legal battles, and the IPO in 2004. This trio—Page, Brin, and Schmidt—ran Google for a decade. It was a unique structure. They shared an office. They made big decisions together. It shouldn't have worked, but it did.
They introduced AdWords in 2000, which is how they actually started making money. Before that, everyone was worried they were just a charity for information. AdWords allowed small businesses to buy keywords, and the auction-based system meant that Google didn't have to hire thousands of salespeople. The tech did the selling for them.
Misconceptions About the Early Days
A lot of people think Google was the first search engine. Not even close. Lycos, Magellan, and Infoseek were all there first. Google won because it was better, not because it was first. It was the first to realize that the relationship between pages mattered more than the content on the page itself.
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Another myth is that they were always "Don't Be Evil." That famous motto was actually suggested by an early employee named Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail) and Amit Patel during a meeting about corporate values. They wanted something that felt different from the ruthless tech giants of the 80s and 90s.
The Transition to Alphabet
In 2015, the structure of the company changed drastically. They created a parent company called Alphabet Inc. Larry Page became the CEO of Alphabet, and Sergey Brin became the President. Sundar Pichai, who had been a star product manager (overseeing Chrome and Android), took over as the CEO of Google.
Why do this? Basically, Google had become too big. They were doing everything from self-driving cars to life-extension research. By creating Alphabet, they could keep the "search and ads" business separate from the "crazy experimental" stuff.
In 2019, Page and Brin officially stepped down from their executive roles at Alphabet. They’re still on the board and they still hold the majority of the voting power, so they're definitely still the bosses. But they aren't involved in the day-to-day grind anymore. Sundar Pichai now runs the whole show.
Actionable Takeaways From the Google Story
Understanding who made Google is more than a history lesson. It's a blueprint for how modern tech works. If you're looking to apply their "scrappy to global" logic to your own projects or just want to navigate the web better, keep these points in mind:
- Solve the fundamental problem first. Page and Brin didn't worry about monetization for years. They focused entirely on making search results 10% better than the competition.
- Simplicity is a feature. The "blank page" of Google is still the gold standard for user experience. If your product is hard to use, people will find an alternative that isn't.
- Academic rigor pays off. Don't dismiss "theory." The math behind PageRank is what killed the competition. Deep expertise is often more valuable than a good marketing team.
- Don't fear the pivot. They started as "BackRub." They tried to sell the company. They changed their name. They changed their CEO. Flexibility is why they survived.
If you want to see how this history still impacts your life today, take a look at your "My Activity" page in your Google Account. It’s a direct descendant of that original mission to organize the world's information—starting with yours. You can manage what they track, which is a good step for anyone worried about the scale of what Larry and Sergey built.
Check your privacy settings once a quarter. It’s the best way to stay in control of the tool that these two Stanford students built in their Duplo-clad server room. Their invention changed the world, but you're the one who decides how it works for you.