One one of the most popular web URLs marks an anniversary milestone
Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- On Sept. 15, 1997, the domain name google.com was registered, laying the groundwork for the most popular website on the Internet
- The name “Google” is a play on the mathematical term “googol”
- Today, Google is the third most publicly traded company behind Nvidia and Apple
If Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin stuck with their earlier name of their then-new search engine, “Backrub,” the entire Internet landscape — and perhaps the whole world — might have turned out significantly different from what we know now.
Fortunately, the budding tech titans changed their minds and called their new company Google, a play on the mathematical term “googol,” which is 10 to the power of 100. According to the company, the name “Google” reflected the co-founders’ mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
One major step Page and Brin took to ensure Google would be universally recognized for decades to come was registering the company’s domain name, which happened 29 years ago today — Sept. 15, 1997, as Business Insider reported in 2017.
On Sept. 4, 1998, almost one year after registering “google.com,” the company was founded, per Euronews. A month earlier, Page and Brin received a check for $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim to fund what would become Google Inc.
“With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee #16 and former CEO of YouTube). Clunky desktop computers, a ping pong table, and bright blue carpet set the scene for those early days and late nights,” the company’s biography reads.
Since the company’s founding, google.com ranks as the most visited website in the world as of June 2026, according to Semrush, followed by youtube.com (the domain of YouTube, which is owned by Google) and facebook.com. In addition to its search engine, Google has developed hundreds of products for global consumption, including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Google Earth and Android.
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In 2015, Alphabet was created as a corporate restructuring of Google and became its parent company. Page and Brin served as CEO and president of Alphabet respectively until December 2019. Today, Alphabet is ranked third on the list of the most publicly traded companies with a $4.2 trillion market cap, behind Nvidia and Apple, per the Motley Fool, and employs nearly 200,000 full-time workers.
Google is more than just an online search engine and a tech behemoth. The site’s name has been part of the cultural lexicon, specifically as a verb in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (someone or something) on the Internet.”
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