Google Turns 26: From Susan Wojcicki's Garage To Mountain View, The Journey Of Tech Giant

Tech giant Google turned 26 on Wednesday, September 4. It was in 1998 when two PhD students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – established the business in a small garage in Menlo Park. More than two decades later, Google has now become a constant companion for many internet users.

The journey started in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who earlier served as the CEO of YouTube and died last month after battling cancer for a prolonged period.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented Wojcicki’s garage to open their business. They used to pay a monthly rent of $1,700 for the space. The parent company has been renamed Alphabet with the Google search engine being a subsidiary of it. Impressed by the business idea, Wojcicki later joined Page and Brin as the marketing manager of their start-up in 1999.

In the early days, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to learn the concept of information retrieval. The duo then decided to develop a search engine and it was only meant for organising data available on the internet. Their idea impressed many technology enthusiasts and a lot of investors shifted their focus to Google. Thanks to financial aid, Page and Brin opened a new office at Mountain View in California and the rest is history.

The name ‘“Google” is now not only limited to a search engine. The tech behemoth has taken over the other sectors as well. Apart from linking up with the Android operating system, Google currently has its own mail service (Gmail), cloud storage, photo gallery as well as a video streaming platform. The company has also started working on artificial intelligence (AI) and has already made significant progress in this regard.

The journey of Google might have started on September 4 but the company celebrates its anniversary every year on September 26. “Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, but for more than a decade we’ve celebrated our birthday on September 27, with an annual Doodle, of course,” it said earlier in a blog post.

Google logged an annual revenue of 305.63 billion U.S. dollars last year and those earnings were mostly generated by advertisements on different platforms.