Google is 25 years old next month

IT WAS 25 years ago, on 4th September 1998, that Google, the internet search company, was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both students at Stanford

University in California.

The company was originally based in a friend’s garage at nearby Menlo Park.

It began in January 1996 as a simple research project which employed links to decide the importance of individual pages on the world wide web. The two students – both Jewish – worked from their college rooms and called the search engine BackRub, a name fairly rap- idly abandoned. Google is a slight misspelling (or reinvention) of the word googol, which is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. floundering distantly in its wake. Google Inc was born officially in late summer 1998 when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Page and Brin a cheque for £100,000. There was a third founder, Scott Hassan, who wrote much of the original code, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company. Today, however, he is described as a serial entrepreneur with a net worth of around a billion dollars. Being a huge company, Google has plenty of critics, but its code of conduct, stated in 2004, was “Don’t be evil” because “we believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served – as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world, even if we forgo some short-term gains”.

This turned out to be quite appropriate, given the amount of information involved. Google is now the world’s most used search engine by far, leaving such “competitors” as DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo!