On September 4, 1998, Google Inc. was incorporated in Menlo Park, California, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford graduate students who had built a search engine called BackRub two years earlier. The company started with a bank account holding about 100,000 dollars from an early investor, Andy Bechtolsheim. It had no office.
The idea behind it was PageRank, which treated a link as a vote rather than matching keywords on a page, on the reasoning that a link from a page that many other pages point to carries more weight than one from a page nobody reads. Page and Brin wrote it up as a paper while still at Stanford. That structure gave better results than the directory and keyword sites of the late 1990s, which were already filling with pages written purely to game them.
The timing helped. Search was becoming the main way people found things online, and the incumbent portals were cluttered with news, stock tickers and banner ads. Google's home page was nearly empty. It loaded fast and took a query without asking for anything else.
The company moved to Mountain View in 1999 and held its initial public offering in August 2004. From a search box it grew into advertising, e-mail, maps, video and a mobile operating system. Ads paid for it all.