Everybody uses Google. Almost nobody knows how it started. The company is closing in on thirty years old and it feels like it has always been there. Now rewind to Stanford in 1995. Two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, meet and launch a research project with a name that would have killed any pitch on the spot: «BackRub».
Here is the deal. Google stops making sense the second you call it a search engine. Look at it as an advertising machine that organises the world’s information on the side, and every curiosity you have ever read about it falls into place. The button that costs it millions, the servers, the doodles. All of it. Once you see the advertising engine underneath, the trivia starts to read like hard evidence.
Who founded Google and how it began
The founders are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University. They met in 1995. In 1996 they switched on a search engine called BackRub, and it did what the other engines did not. Instead of counting how many times a word appeared on a page, it counted the links pointing at that page. Think about that for a second. A link is a vote of confidence, nothing more and nothing less. The pages that collected the most votes climbed to the top, and the whole system kept holding up as the web grew. That one idea became PageRank, and PageRank ordered the web for years afterwards.
They registered «google.com» in September 1997. In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim handed them a cheque for $100,000 before the company even existed on paper. With that money they incorporated Google Inc. on 4 September 1998 and moved out of the dorm room into a garage in Menlo Park, California. The garage belonged to Susan Wojcicki. Yes, the same woman who would later run YouTube.
August 2004 brought the stock market listing. In 2015 the founders reorganised the whole thing under a parent company called Alphabet, with Google as its largest subsidiary. The mission they pinned on the door has not moved since: «to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful».
How does Google make money?
Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube and Android cost you nothing. So where does the money come from? From advertising.
Two engines do the work.
- Google Ads. Adverts that sit next to search results and across thousands of partner websites. Advertisers bid on keywords and pay every time somebody clicks.
- Google AdSense. That same advertising, served on third-party pages, from which Google takes a cut.
That is why search is free. You are the product, or more precisely your attention and the data that lets Google sharpen each advert. This is the model that shaped a large part of the internet, and it turned a garage project into one of the most valuable companies on earth. You type exactly what you want and an advertiser answers you. That is the whole transaction, repeated billions of times a day.
The numbers settle the argument. In its 2025 financial year, Alphabet booked $402.836 billion in revenue, and $294.691 billion of that came from Google advertising, according to its official accounts. Search and other services contributed $224.532 billion, YouTube $40.367 billion, and the partner network $29.792 billion. Roughly three quarters of the whole business is selling adverts.
What Google is today: more than a search box
Search is still the front door, but Google is a conglomerate now. The company sorts its business into three blocks: Google Services (Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Maps, Play and devices), Google Cloud (infrastructure and tools for companies) and Other Bets (long-term wagers such as the self-driving car company Waymo). Android carries a story of its own, and we tell it next to the operating systems.
Two figures give you the scale. YouTube passed $60 billion in annual revenue in 2025 across advertising and subscriptions. Google Cloud closed that year at an annual run rate above $70 billion. Add the layer of products most people never tie to one single company: Gmail, Drive, Google Workspace, Maps, Gemini and the Pixel phones. Google began by finding pages on the open web. Today it also sells cloud capacity, subscriptions and telephones, and it collects a cut from almost every layer of the stack. The search box is where most people meet the company. By now the money arrives from a dozen other products.
12 Google facts
- Its name comes from «googol». A googol is 10 to the power of 100, an absurdly large number. They picked it to stand for the amount of information they set out to organise, and the company still leans on the idea: its official mission is to make «the world’s information» accessible.
- Its first server sat inside a Lego case. They built the chassis out of toy bricks because there was no budget for anything better. That build has also been credited with the logo’s palette. What is verifiable is that the server exists and is kept at Stanford University.
- There are many ways to reach Google. Besides «google.com», they registered typo variants («gogle.com», «gooogle.com»…) so a slip of the fingers does not drop you somewhere else.
- Its page looked too simple. In an era of heavy websites and slow loads, Google’s page appeared so fast that people thought it had failed to load. They had to add a copyright footer just to show that «that was all».
- The first «doodle» was in 1998. A drawing of the Burning Man festival to signal that Page and Brin were away for a few days. It started as a notice and became a section with its own team. The original still sits in Google’s archive.
- They almost sold it for a million dollars. In the late nineties they offered the company to several giants of the day. Nobody paid. That figure looks laughable now.
- The «I’m Feeling Lucky» button costs hundreds of millions a year. It takes you straight to the first result, with no adverts shown. In 2007 Google’s then head of search, Marissa Mayer, said about 1% of visitors used it, and one analyst put the lost ad revenue at around $110 million a year. The company keeps it because it is part of its image.
- Its servers are countless. Only the company knows the exact number. What it does publish is where they are: a network of data centres across the Americas, Europe and Asia, each one running servers Google designs itself.
- When Google goes down, the internet notices. On 16 August 2013 its services dropped for a few minutes, and the analytics firm GoSquared recorded a fall of around 40% in the pages it tracked in real time. That is how much the web leans on one company.
- Working there is many people’s dream. The Googleplex in Mountain View is probably the most famous office in the world: free food, rest areas and every kind of perk. It is also the classic example of the downsides that model brings with it.
- Its algorithms move entire businesses. They decide which page wins and which disappears. They change hundreds of times a year and nobody fully knows their criteria. An entire industry grew out of that gap: SEO. Whole companies live or die on a single ranking change.
- There is a Klingon version of Google. Seriously. The Star Trek interface is still there for anyone who wants to search in it. Google has been dressing its pages in fictional languages for years, and Klingon is the one that stuck. Just switch the language.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Google?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford students who met in 1995. They started with a search engine called BackRub and incorporated Google Inc. on 4 September 1998, with Susan Wojcicki’s garage as its first office.
How did Google make money at first?
With contextual advertising: relevant adverts next to search results. That model later expanded to thousands of third-party sites through AdSense and remains, by far, its main source of revenue.
How much does Google make a year?
In 2025 its parent company, Alphabet, reported revenues of $402.836 billion, with Google advertising contributing $294.691 billion, roughly three quarters of the total. Those are figures from the official accounts Alphabet publishes every quarter.
Why is Google called Google?
After «googol», the number 10100. Its founders wanted to reflect the amount of information they intended to index. The name came out as a misspelling of the word, and it has been Google ever since.
How much of the internet depends on Google?
Far more than it seems: search, video, email, maps, browser and phones. A 2013 outage of just a few minutes laid that dependency bare. If you have ever wondered what life without that layer looks like, here is how to disconnect for real.
The bottom line
Google is two things at once: the largest library in history and the biggest advertising company ever built. The two live in the same building, and that explains almost everything else about it.
Keep that map in your head the next time you type a question into the box. It is the portrait of a company that started in a garage and now decides what the world finds when it searches. If you enjoy these round-ups, here are more computing facts and, for the full context, the history of computing.