A timeline of Google's rise from a Stanford dorm project to a global tech giant: the garage, the IPO, Android, YouTube, Alphabet, and the AI era.
Google's rise from a Stanford dorm project to one of the most valuable companies on Earth: the garage, the IPO, Android and YouTube, Alphabet, the AI race, and the antitrust reckoning.
Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin start a search project ranking pages by backlinks - the seed of Google. Month approximate.
The founders register google.com, a play on 'googol' - 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim invests $100,000 in 'Google Inc.' before the company legally exists. Exact day not formally recorded.
Page and Brin incorporate Google and set up shop in Susan Wojcicki's Menlo Park garage.
Self-serve search ads debut - the business model that will fund everything Google builds.
Schmidt takes over as CEO, forming a decade-long triumvirate with founders Page and Brin.
An algorithmically assembled news service debuts, built in the wake of 9/11 information overload.
Google unveils free email with 1 GB of storage - so generous many assumed it was an April Fools' joke.
Google goes public at $85 a share via an unusual Dutch auction, valuing the company around $23 billion.
Draggable web maps debut, soon joined by satellite imagery and directions.
Google quietly buys Andy Rubin's mobile startup, a roughly $50 million deal that reshapes the phone industry.
Google buys the 18-month-old video site in stock - one of the most consequential acquisitions in tech history.
Google and the Open Handset Alliance announce the open-source Android platform; the first phone, the T-Mobile G1, ships in 2008.
Google releases its own browser; Chrome eventually becomes the world's most used.
Google buys the London AI lab for a reported ~$500 million+, a bet that pays off in breakthroughs like AlphaGo.
Google reorganizes under holding company Alphabet; Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of Google.
Google researchers post 'Attention Is All You Need', the architecture behind the modern AI boom.
Page and Brin step back; Sundar Pichai leads both Google and Alphabet.
Google launches Gemini, its flagship multimodal AI model family, consolidating its answer to ChatGPT.
A US federal judge rules Google illegally maintained a monopoly in search - the biggest antitrust defeat in its history.
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