In August 2026, StatCounter put Google's global search share at about 91.1%. More than nine in ten web searches worldwide now pass through the service. It began with borrowed equipment and a Lego-built server; today, it runs one of the world's most widely used digital ecosystems.
Google began operating in 1998, after Larry Page and Sergey Brin created it. The company was formally established on 4 September, and its area, google.com, was registered on 15 September. Google marks its public anniversary on 27 September, a tradition linked to the search engine's early public availability.
The company's scale is reflected in the services under its name. Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube and Gmail, along with the artificial intelligence platform Gemini, extend its global reach. Google operates under Alphabet Inc. and employs close to 200,000 people worldwide.
The anniversary is also a public corporate event. In 2026, reports linked the Doodle to Google Store promotions, pairing company history with commercial activity.
Its early infrastructure looked very different. In 1995, the founders had limited financial and technical resources. They combined old computer components with equipment borrowed from Stanford University to build the platform's first server, using Lego pieces for its structure. That improvised setup became part of the story of a service built to organise the huge amount of information appearing on the internet.
The project was first called BackRub because its central system relied on PageRank, which assessed links between pages. The founders later adopted google, a variation on googol, the name for a number followed by 100 zeros.
The first recorded searches also point to the company's university roots. In 1996, the service still used Stanford's academic area, and the algorithm first crawled the university's own website. After the commercial area went live on 27 September 1998, the first term entered into the search box was "Gerhard Casper", the name of Stanford's president at the time.
A university-based experiment became a search service used for more than nine out of every ten web queries. It also expanded into mobile software, mapping, video, email, browsers and artificial intelligence. Anniversary coverage still puts Page and Brin's Stanford years at the centre of the origin story.
Google's anniversary charts the platform's rise from improvised hardware to the centre of everyday internet access. Its original search mission remains at the basic of a technology empire that has grown since 1998.
