The Invention of Google

Google is the most popular Internet search engine in the world. It was invented by two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They met in 1995, when they were both studying computer science at Stanford University, USA. They were both fans of science fiction TV programme Star Trek, and they loved the spaceship computer. They dreamed of producing something that could also answer any questions in seconds.

Internet search engines at the time were slow and gave many websites that weren’t useful. In January 1996, Page and Brin decided to make a better and faster search engine. They thought the results should be based on the popularity of each website – the most popular ones have the highest number of ‘weblinks’ (links to the other websites).

Nobody would give them money for their project, so they used their credit cards and bought as much computer memory as possible. They also borrowed money from their family and friends. Then, in 1998, they were given a cheque for $100,000, and they started their own company. Their firs office was in their friend’s garage! The company name Google comes from mathematics. A ‘googol’ is a very high number – 1 followed by a hundred of zeros.

The Google search engine was soon used by thousands of people worldwide because it was fast, easy and accurate. By 2002 it was the biggest search engine on the Internet. Now, more questions have been answered by Google than any other Internet service, from sport to science, and from music to medicine. Google hopes that in the future all the world’s information will be put on the Internet, so that everybody can find everything.