**The Two Students Who Built Google in a Garage (And Changed the Internet Forever)**
(Who Made Google)
Think the best ideas come from fancy labs or corporate offices? Think again. Sometimes, world-changing inventions start in a college dorm. This is the story of two nerdy students, a messy garage, and a search engine that reshaped how we find information.
It all began in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page, a 22-year-old grad student from Michigan, met Sergey Brin, a 21-year-old math whiz from Moscow. At first, they didn’t click. Larry was quiet and loved technical details. Sergey was outgoing and debated everything. But they shared one big obsession: organizing the exploding amount of data on the internet.
Back then, searching the web felt like digging through a junk drawer. Sites like Yahoo! listed websites by category, but results were cluttered and irrelevant. Larry had a wild idea. What if a search engine could rank pages based on how many other sites linked to them? He called this concept “Backrub.” Sergey joined him, and together they turned the idea into math. Their algorithm, later named “PageRank,” analyzed links between websites to decide which ones were most trustworthy.
By 1996, they tested their project on Stanford’s network. It worked—almost too well. Students and professors loved it, but it used so much bandwidth that the university’s internet slowed down. Stanford told them to take it off the campus servers. So they moved to a garage in Menlo Park, rented from a friend named Susan Wojcicki (who later became YouTube’s CEO). The garage had a washer, dryer, and a hot tub they never used. Their first “office” was cluttered with wires, pizza boxes, and a neon sign that said “Google.” Wait, *Google*?
Yep. The name was a typo. They meant “googol,” the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It symbolized their mission: organizing infinite online information. The typo stuck. By 1998, Google Inc. was officially born. Their first big break came from Andy Bechtolsheim, a Silicon Valley investor. He wrote them a $100,000 check after a quick demo in a driveway—before the company even existed legally.
Growth wasn’t smooth. Early employees worked crazy hours. Servers crashed. Competitors laughed at their plain white homepage. But Google’s results were unbeatable. People kept coming back. By 2004, the company went public, making Larry and Sergey billionaires overnight.
What’s wild is how much they got right early on. The famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto? Added by an early employee to remind everyone to stay honest. The playful doodles on the homepage? Larry and Sergey insisted on them to show Google had personality. Even their first April Fool’s joke—a job opening for a “Copernicus Research Center” on the moon—hinted at their quirky culture.
(Who Made Google)
Today, Google handles over 8 billion searches a day. It’s expanded into maps, email, self-driving cars, and AI. Larry and Sergey stepped down from daily roles in 2019, but their dorm-room project is now a verb. Need answers? Just “Google it.” Not bad for two guys who started with a garage, a typo, and a math problem.
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