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Google history
Google company history timeline
Google was initially funded by an August 1998 investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a few weeks prior to September 7, 1998, the day Google was officially incorporated.
In 1998, Page launched a monthly newsletter called "Google Friends Newsletter" to inform fans about the company.
In 1998, Page created a computerized version of the word Google using the free graphics program GIMP. He changed the typeface and added an exclamation mark to mimic, or mock, Yahoo!'s logo.
Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998.
In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, which is home to several prominent Silicon Valley technology start-ups.
On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
1999: Google moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, and later to Mountain View, California; Red Hat becomes Google's first commercial customer.
Early in 1999, while graduate students, Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much time and distracting their academic pursuits.
In May 2000 Google received a Webby award for Best Technical Achievement for 2000 and a People's Voice Award for Technical Achievement.
In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites at the time, replacing Inktomi.
The Google Toolbar, a highly popular innovative browser plug-in, was introduced in late 2000.
Google established itself back in 2000 as a dominant force in web advertising with the launch of AdWords.
Carl Page, Larry's brother, helped start the eGroups and dot.com company in the 1990s. It was bought by Yahoo! for almost half a billion dollars in 2000.
By early 2001 Google was powering search services at Yahoo! Japan, Fujitsu NIFTY and NEC BIGLOBE, the top three portals in Japan, as well as United States corporate sites, Procter & Gamble, IDG.net, Vodaphone, and MarthaStewart.com.
The list of search services customers continued to grow throughout 2001 with the addition of Sprint and Handspring.
Additionally, in 2001, Google released its first annual "Google Zeitgeist" which takes a look at what millions of people searched for over the previous year - a tradition that still continues to this day.
In 2001, Google received a patent for its PageRank mechanism.
In 2001, Google employee Paul Buchheit started work on an email product designed to address the company’s increasing internal communications and storage needs.
Additionally, in 2001 Google's Investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google
In January 2002, Google announced the availability of the Google Search Appliance, an integrated hardware/software solution that extended the power of Google to corporate intranets and Web servers.
The 2002 Google Programming Contest, launched in early 2002, announced its first winner of $10,000 for the creation of a geographic search program that enables users to search for Web pages within a specified geographic area.
Plans for the remainder of 2002 at Google include efforts to intensify its global push--half the company's search queries come from aboard--and to expand its corporate search services, which power the Web sites for other corporations.
In 2002, Brin and Page approached Yahoo! once again.
Google Labs was also born in 2002 and the company opened its first office in Australia.
In 2002, Google introduced additional ad services with its Google Search Appliance and the addition of cost-per-click pricing to its Adwords.
By the summer of 2002, Yahoo tried to acquire Google for $3 billion, but Google reportedly turned down the deal as it felt it was worth at least $5 billion.
For example, in 2003 Google spent $102 million to acquire Applied Semantics, the makers of AdSense, a service that signed up owners of Web sites to run various types of ads on their Web pages.
In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.
By 2004, the company had grown to more than 800 employees.
Also in 2004, Google launched its Google Scholar service, a free web-based service that indexes the full text, or metadata, of scholarly literature across many publishing formats and disciplines.
The company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2004 raised $1.66 billion for the company and made Brin and Page instant billionaires.
In 2004 the company announced Google Print, a project with several major libraries around the world that would begin to make their holdings freely available on the Internet.
Schmidt stayed in this position for 10 years, seeing the search giant through its 2004 IPO, the acquisition of YouTube, and the introduction of products like Google Docs and Gmail.
In January 2005 Google launched Google Video, which enabled individuals to search the close-captioned text from television broadcasts.
The reason for the choice of September 27 remains unclear, and a dispute with rival search engine Yahoo! Search in 2005 has been suggested as the cause.
Phone apps became a big part of Google's strategy in 2005 with search software and Google Maps available on mobile platforms.
Also in 2005, YouTube's (not yet part of Google) first video went online.
XL2Web was acquired by Google in 2005.
In 2005, articles inThe New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.
”Maps can be useful and fun,” said Google when it first introduced Maps in 2005.
After quietly buying Android for $50 million in 2005, what would become the most popular mobile OS in the world made its debut with the announcement of the T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream, the first Android phone.
In January 2006 Google Video Store opened, featuring premium content from traditional media companies such as CBS Corporation (television shows) and Sony Corporation (movies). In June 2006 Google began offering premium content for free but with ads.
Writely was a web-based word processor created by software company Upstartle, which was acquired by Google in 2006.
In 2006 Google again paid $102 million for another Web advertisement business, dMarc Broadcasting, and that same year it announced that it would pay $900 million over three and a half years for the right to sell ads on MySpace.com.
Unable to generate anything close to the same number of uploads and viewers, Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock.
In 2006, Google launched a subsidiary based in China to more effectively compete with its local alternative, Baidu.
The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertisingmarket.
In 2007, Fortune ranked Google the number one company to work for.
The Android operating system was also created in 2007.
In 2007 Google made its largest acquisition to date, buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.
In 2008 Google reached a legal settlement in which the company agreed to pay the groups $125 million for past transgressions, though users could continue to read for free up to 20 percent of each work scanned by Google.
In 2009, Google released Google Voice.
In January 2010 Google announced that it had detected a series of sophisticated hacking attacks, originating in China, that were directed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists and foreign journalists working in China.
Google expanded into internet delivery with its plan to build ultra-high-speed broadband networks in 2010.
The highly recognizable Google logo received its first "major" overhaul in 2010.
At the start of 2010, Google discovered a sophisticated phishing attack in China on its infrastructure aimed at extracting the email addresses and personal info of Chinese human rights activists.
In August 2011, reports estimated that Google had almost one million servers in data centers around the world.
2011 saw the launch of Google Flights.
The trio ran the company as a “triumvirate” until Page took on the CEO role in 2011, Schmidt became executive chairman, and Brin adopted the title of director of special projects.
In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in its largest acquisition to date.
In October 2012, Google Documents became simply Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets was officially renamed Google Sheets.
The installation of Google Fiber began in 2012 by supplying consumers in Kansas.
Google's first employee, Craig Silverstein, continued working at the company until 2012, though he'd moved up the ladder a bit.
As of 2012, Google had scanned more than 15 million books.
To demonstrate the power of Project Glass, Sergey Brin showed off a live recording from a skydive at the company’s I/O developer conference in 2012.
In June 2013, Google acquired Waze, a $966 million deal.
As of September 2013, Google operates 70 offices in more than 40 countries.
Google celebrated its 15-year anniversary on September 27, 2013, although it has used other dates for its official birthday.
Google announced the launch of a new company, called Calico, on September 19, 2013, to be led by Apple Inc. chairman Arthur Levinson.
The corporation’s consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2013 is reported in mid-October 2013 as US$14.89 billion, a 12 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.
In 2013, the company introduced a new "flat" logo with a slightly altered color palette.
On January 26, 2014, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a privately held artificial intelligence company from London.
In 2014, Google launched its free web service Google Classroom.
On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc.
To commemorate the reorganization, Google unveiled a new logo one month later on September 1st, 2015.
In 2015, Google announced its plans to re-organize its interests into a conglomerate called Alphabet.
In 2015, Google underwent a restructuring of divisions and personnel under the conglomerate name Alphabet.
In 2016, Google announced that their Picasa desktop application would be discontinued and that the Picasa Web Albums service would also be closed the same year.
In 2016 Alphabet earned nearly all of its revenue from Google advertising based on users’ search requests.
Search engine Yahoo!, once a giant of the internet, merged with Verizon in 2017, marking the end of an era for a company that once almost defined the internet.
Yahoo, on the other hand, sold to Verizon in 2017 for — ironically — just under $5 billion.
On October 25, 2018, The New York Times published the exposé, "How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the 'Father of Android'". The company subsequently announced that "48 employees have been fired over the last two years" for sexual misconduct.
Many of those people use Google software to search the repository of human knowledge, communicate, perform work, consume media, and maneuver the endlessly vast internet in 2018.
The company is already testing out offering rides to real customers in Arizona, and it plans to fully launch a commercial service in 2018.
On March 19, 2019, Google announced that it would enter the video game market, launching a cloud gaming platform called Google Stadia.
On June 3, 2019, the United States Department of Justice reported that it would investigate Google for antitrust violations.
More changes followed in 2019 as both Brin and Page left their posts as president and CEO, respectively.
In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced several cost-cutting measures.
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In March 2021, Google reportedly paid $20 million for Ubisoft ports on Google Stadia.
In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called 'Project Bernanke' that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing for ad services.
In September 2021, the Australian government announced plans to curb Google’s capability to sell targeted ads, claiming that the company has a monopoly on the market harming publishers, advertisers, and consumers.
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Google competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | 1975 | $245.1B | 182,268 | 2,153 |
| Meta | 2004 | $164.5B | 71,970 | 10,993 |
| IBM | 1911 | $62.8B | 270,000 | 3,540 |
| 2003 | $3.0B | 15,000 | 459 | |
| Dell | 1984 | $95.6B | 165,000 | 147 |
| Intel | 1968 | $53.1B | 121,100 | 224 |
| Adobe | 1982 | $21.5B | 11,847 | 907 |
| VMware | 1998 | $13.4B | 31,000 | 2 |
| Yammer | 2008 | $50.0M | 85 | - |
| HP | 1939 | $53.6B | 53,000 | 296 |
Google history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Google, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Google. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Google. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Google. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Google and its employees or that of Zippia.
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