Alphabet's Google Milestones: From 1995 Startup to Global Tech Giant

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1995 while they were graduate students at Stanford University. Their early search engine, called BackRub, later became Google when the domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. The company incorporated on September 4, 1998, in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park and moved to offices in Palo Alto and then Mountain View.

Since then Google launched a succession of widely used services: Google Images (2001), Google News (2002), Blogger (acquired 2003), Google Books (2003), Gmail (2004), Google Scholar (2004), Google Maps (2005), Google Earth (2005), Google Talk (2005), YouTube (acquired 2006), Android OS (2007) and its first Android phone in 2008, as well as Chrome. The company’s IPO on August 19, 2004 raised about $1.2 billion. Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent, reported 198,933 employees as of June 30 2026.