Google at 28

 

On 27 September, Google celebrates its birthday. The date is slightly symbolic: Google Inc. was formally incorporated on 4 September 1998, but for more than a decade the company has observed 27 September as its official birthday. In 2026, that makes Google 28 years old.

Twenty-eight years is not a long time in human history. It is less than a generation. Yet during

that short period, Google has changed the way billions of people search for knowledge, communicate, travel, study, shop, work and entertain themselves. More importantly, it has helped change our relationship with information itself.

 

The problem of finding something on the Internet

To understand why Google mattered, we have to return to the Internet of the mid-1990s.

The World Wide Web was growing rapidly. Thousands, and soon millions, of webpages were appearing, but finding useful information among them was becoming increasingly difficult. Early search engines could locate pages containing particular words, but they were not always good at deciding which pages were genuinely useful.

Two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began thinking about the problem differently.

Their insight was remarkably simple.

Suppose two scientific papers contain the same keyword. How might we decide which paper is more important? One clue is how many other researchers cite it. Furthermore, a citation from an influential paper might carry more significance than one from an obscure source.

Page and Brin realised that something similar could be done with the Web.

A hyperlink from one webpage to another could be treated rather like a citation in a scientific paper. Pages receiving many important links might themselves be important.

This idea developed into the famous PageRank algorithm.

Their experimental search engine was initially called BackRub, because it analysed the web of ‘back links’ connecting one page to another. Eventually they chose a new name inspired by the mathematical word googol—the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The enormous number seemed appropriate for a project whose ambition was to organise an almost unimaginably large quantity of information.

Google was born.

 

A remarkably simple white page

Google's early homepage looked almost empty.

At a time when many Internet portals were crowded with news, advertising, weather reports, directories and flashing graphics, Google offered little more than a logo, a search box and a couple of buttons.

The simplicity was deceptive.

Behind that white page was a sophisticated system for collecting, indexing and ranking webpages.

People soon discovered something important: Google often found what they were looking for faster and more accurately than competing search engines.

The company's mission was correspondingly ambitious: to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

That statement would eventually take Google far beyond search.

 

From search engine to advertising giant

A search engine, however, requires enormous computing resources. Servers, data centres, engineers and Internet connections all cost money.

Google's solution became one of the most successful business models of the digital era: advertising connected to what people were searching for.

Instead of simply showing everyone the same advertisement, Google could display advertising related to a user's query. Someone searching for a hotel in Paris might see hotel advertisements; someone searching for a digital camera might see camera advertisements.

This marriage of search and targeted advertising transformed Google from a clever university project into an extraordinarily profitable company.

In 2004 Google entered the stock market through its initial public offering. But by then it was already beginning to demonstrate that search would be only the first chapter of its story.

 

Gmail and the expanding Google universe

On 1 April 2004, Google announced Gmail.

Because it was April Fool's Day and Gmail initially offered an astonishing one gigabyte of free email storage, some people wondered whether the announcement was a joke.

It was not.

Gmail illustrated an increasingly important Google philosophy: services that once lived primarily on a personal computer could instead operate through the Internet.

Google Maps followed in 2005.

Suddenly, a browser could become an interactive atlas. Maps could be dragged across the screen, enlarged, reduced and combined with satellite images. Later, smartphones would turn Google Maps into something even more powerful: a constantly available navigation system carried in a pocket.

Then came two acquisitions that would profoundly shape the company's future.

Google acquired Android in 2005 and YouTube in 2006.

At the time, neither purchase necessarily looked like the foundation of a technological empire. Yet Android became one of the world's dominant smartphone operating systems, while YouTube became one of history's largest repositories of video, music, education and entertainment.

Google was gradually ceasing to be merely a place people visited to search the Web.

It was becoming part of the infrastructure of the Web.

 

Chrome and the battle for the browser

In 2008 Google introduced Chrome.

A web browser might seem an unusual product for a search company, but the logic was clear. Increasingly, people's computing activities were happening inside the browser.

Email, documents, maps, video, shopping and social communication were moving online.

If the browser became the doorway to the Internet, Google wanted to help build that doorway.

Chrome eventually became one of the world's dominant browsers, while Google's services—Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Drive, Photos and others—became woven into the everyday routines of hundreds of millions and ultimately billions of people.

By 2023, Google said that 15 of its products were each being used by more than half a billion people every day.

Few companies in history had achieved such extraordinary reach.

 

Jennifer Lopez helped create Google Images

Some of Google's innovations emerged from surprisingly ordinary human behaviour.

In 2000, Jennifer Lopez appeared at the Grammy Awards wearing a now-famous green Versace dress. Enormous numbers of people searched Google hoping to see photographs of it.

But Google Search primarily returned text links.

People did not simply want information about the dress. They wanted to see it.

The demand helped inspire Google Images, launched in 2001.

The episode reveals an important part of Google's evolution.

Every time people asked the Internet a new kind of question, Google had to invent a new way of answering it.

Words led to images. Addresses led to maps. Questions about nearby places led to location-aware mobile search. Spoken questions encouraged voice recognition. Photographs encouraged visual search. And eventually complicated questions would help push Google toward artificial intelligence.

 

Machine learning quietly enters search

Artificial intelligence did not suddenly arrive at Google with ChatGPT.

It had been creeping into Google's products for years.

Even apparently simple features such as ‘Did you mean?’, which suggests corrected spelling for a mistyped search, were early examples of machine-learning approaches being incorporated into Search. Google identifies the feature, introduced around 2001, as one of its early applications of machine learning.

Over subsequent years machine learning became increasingly important in translation, speech recognition, image recognition, advertising, spam filtering and search ranking.

Google Translate learned to produce increasingly natural translations. Google Photos learned to recognise objects and people. Phones learned to understand spoken commands. Search began attempting to understand what users meant, rather than merely matching the exact words they typed.

Google was gradually moving from retrieving information toward interpreting it.

 

Alphabet: Google grows too large for Google

By 2015 the company had become involved in such a bewildering variety of projects that its founders decided to reorganise it.

A new parent company called Alphabet Inc. was created.

Google remained the enormous core business containing Search, Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and many other familiar services. Other experimental businesses could operate separately under Alphabet.

Sundar Pichai, an engineer who had played important roles in Chrome and Android, became CEO of Google.

Four years later, in 2019, Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped away from day-to-day management and Pichai became CEO of Alphabet as well.

The two Stanford students who had begun by trying to improve Internet search had built something far larger than a search engine.

 

From ‘mobile first’ to ‘AI first’

Another transformation was already underway.

For roughly a decade, the smartphone had been the centre of the technology industry. Companies spoke of designing products for a ‘mobile-first’ world.

Google began describing a different future: AI first.

The distinction was significant.

In the mobile era, the central question had often been: How can we put computing into everyone's pocket?

In the AI era, the question increasingly became: How can computers understand language, images, patterns and human intentions?

Google's scientists made major contributions to modern artificial intelligence. Research originating within Google helped advance neural networks, language models and the Transformer architecture, which became fundamental to modern generative AI.

But then the technology industry experienced one of its periodic shocks.

 

The ChatGPT moment

When OpenAI released ChatGPT publicly in late 2022, millions of people encountered a new kind of information system.

Instead of typing keywords and receiving a list of links, they could ask a question conversationally and receive a composed answer.

For Google, this development was particularly important because it challenged the very interface that had defined the company for a quarter of a century.

For decades the dominant model had been: Question → search engine → webpages.

Generative AI suggested another possibility: Question → AI → answer.

Google responded rapidly.

Its AI organisations were consolidated, with Google Brain and DeepMind brought together as Google DeepMind, and its large family of generative-AI models came to be known as Gemini.

AI increasingly appeared throughout Google's products. Search began displaying generated summaries. Gmail could help compose text. Google Workspace could assist with documents and presentations. Android incorporated Gemini. AI systems could interpret not merely words but also photographs, video, sound and other forms of information.

Google Search itself began changing from a system that primarily finds documents into one that increasingly attempts to synthesise answers.

 

A strange transformation of the verb ‘to Google’

Perhaps Google's greatest cultural achievement cannot be measured simply in revenue or market value.

Its name became a verb.

People began saying, ‘Google it.’

That phrase represented something historically remarkable.

For most of human existence, answering a question could require considerable effort. A student might visit a library. A traveller might consult an atlas. A patient might look through an encyclopedia. A researcher might search printed indexes. A telephone number might require a directory.

Within a remarkably short period, much of humanity became accustomed to typing almost any question into a small rectangular box and expecting an answer within fractions of a second.

The resulting convenience is extraordinary.

But it has also created new scientific and social questions.

How should information be ranked? Who decides which sources are trustworthy? How much should an algorithm know about its users? How should personal data be protected? What happens to publishers when answers appear without people visiting their webpages? How do we distinguish reliable information from misinformation? And, perhaps most importantly in the age of generative AI, what happens when a computer system does not simply locate information but begins to write the answer itself?

These are no longer merely engineering problems.

They are questions about knowledge, society and power.

 

Google's 28th birthday

On its 28th birthday in 2026, Google looks very different from the company that began in a Stanford research environment.

Search remains at its heart, but around it now sits a vast technological ecosystem: Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Photos, Workspace, Google Cloud, Pixel devices and increasingly Gemini artificial intelligence.

Even Google's visual identity has begun reflecting this transition. In 2025 the company introduced a brighter gradient version of its familiar four-colour ‘G’, describing the change as representative of Google's evolution in the AI era.

Yet one remarkable continuity remains.

Google's history has always revolved around the same basic human activity: asking questions.

In 1998 the technological challenge was finding the right webpage among millions of pages.

Today the challenge is considerably more ambitious. An AI system may need to understand the question, inspect many kinds of information, reason across them and construct a useful response.

The search box has therefore become something rather different from what Page and Brin originally created.

It is gradually becoming a conversation.

Google's first 28 years were largely about helping humans find information.

Its next chapter may be about teaching machines to understand information well enough to help us use it.

Whether that transformation ultimately proves as revolutionary as Google Search itself remains to be seen.

But there is a pleasing symmetry in the story.

A company created because two university students wanted a better way to answer questions now finds itself confronting perhaps the largest technological question of its existence:

What should it mean to search for knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence?

 

Selected sources

Google: “Our story” / company history: https://about.google/intl/ALL_en/our-story/

Google: 25th birthday reflections: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/google-25th-birthday-sundar-pichai/

Google: 25 years of Search updates: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/25-biggest-google-search-updates/

Google: Building for an AI future: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/building-ai-future-april-2024/

Google: Gradient G logo design: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/gradient-g-logo-design/