Today in History - September 7, 1998 - Google is founded. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at  Stanford and collaborated on a search engine called BackRub. They decided that the BackRub name doesn’t quite have the buzz needed and came up with  Google - a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google says that the use of the term “reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”

The door to Google’s original Menlo Park office (left photo above) came with a remote control because it was attached to the garage of a friend,  Susan Wojcicki,  who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three - Larry and Sergey hired Craig Silverstein as their first employee, a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford. Google moved to its current world headquarters in January of 2004 - the Googleplex, an office complex with cafeterias with free food, laundry machines,  bicycles, and a creative work environment (right photo above). Google went public on August 18, 2004 with a market capitalization of $23 billion. Some of its employees became instant  paper millionaires (center photo above).

Google Earth was launched on June 28, 2005.  The verb, to “google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006. Fortune Magazine names Google as the best company to work for in 2007. Google’s new Green Initiatives include clean energy, reducing our footprint, efficient computing, employee programs and tools for users.  Google Labs continues to test out a wide range of innovative approaches, strategies and algorithms that define the future of media.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Google and  internet search engines. For related educational resources, visit the computing disciplinary communities.