Discover how Google evolved from a Stanford PhD project called 'BackRub' to processing 8.5 billion daily searches and becoming a trillion-dollar company, transforming from garage startup to global tech giant.

Google succeeded because they built better technology, but they built it for real users with real needs. They never lost sight of the fact that their ultimate customer was the person typing a query into that search box.
Criado por ex-alunos da Universidade de Columbia em San Francisco
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Criado por ex-alunos da Universidade de Columbia em San Francisco

Lena: Hey Miles, you know what's crazy? I was just thinking about how many times I've said "let me Google that" today alone. It's become such a reflex, right? But I realized I don't actually know much about how Google started.
Miles: That's such a good point! It's one of those companies that's become so embedded in our daily lives that we almost take it for granted. Did you know Google actually began as a research project called "BackRub" in 1996? Two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were trying to improve how search engines ranked results.
Lena: Wait, BackRub? That's... an interesting name choice.
Miles: Right? Not exactly the global brand name you'd expect! They were actually focused on analyzing the relationships between websites through backlinks—hence the name. But what's fascinating is how quickly they went from a garage startup to a global powerhouse. Within just a few years of incorporating in 1998, they were processing over 500,000 searches per day.
Lena: That's incredible growth. And now what—billions of searches daily?
Miles: Exactly! By 2023, Google was handling approximately 8.5 billion searches per day. The company that started in Susan Wojcicki's garage—who later became YouTube's CEO, by the way—is now worth over a trillion dollars. Let's dive into how this remarkable transformation happened and the key milestones that shaped Google into the tech giant we know today.