Two Stanford Kids Built a Search Engine and Accidentally Became God

Google launched on September 4, 1998, from a garage in Menlo Park, California, founded by two Stanford PhD students who had built a search engine that ranked pages by how many other pages linked to them. This was called PageRank, and it was better than everything else. AltaVista, Lycos, AskJeeves, Yahoo's directory — they all returned results that felt like rummaging through a filing cabinet with oven mitts. Google returned what you were actually looking for, almost immediately, on a homepage so clean it was practically confrontational. Just a logo, a text box, and two buttons. No portal. No news ticker. No weather widget. The austerity was the product. Within two years, Google was processing 100 million searches a day. Within a decade, "Google it" had replaced "look it up" in the English language. The company's informal motto was "Don't Be Evil," which was charming in 1998 and increasingly complicated to defend by 2010 and more or less abandoned by 2018. But in the beginning, it was just a better search engine. The fact that a better search engine would become one of the most powerful companies in human history says everything about what the internet was about to become: a place where organizing information was more valuable than creating it.