Google began as a research project in 1996 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Originally called BackRub, the name was changed to Google and a domain was registered in 1997.
In 1999, the company moved from Menlo Park to Palo Alto.
The company has grown extremely quickly since incorporating in 1998. Google has acquired many other tech companies since 2001, including Keyhole Inc. whose software became Google Earth, Youtube, Grandcentral which became Google Voice and many other smaller companies.
In 2004, the company went public and outsiders feared the company would lose their “do no evil” culture.
In September 2018, Google made numerous changes to their browser Chrome, including login changes that angered many users.
Today, the company process over 1 billion search queries per day and runs over 1 million servers in datacenters worldwide. The Google corporate office is located in Mountain View, California.
