Google “came out” in the late 1990s: Google Inc. was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Menlo Park, California.

Quick Scoop

  • Google started as a Stanford research project in the mid‑1990s under the name “BackRub,” focused on ranking pages by links rather than just keywords.
  • The name was changed to “Google” in 1997, a play on the math term “googol” (1 followed by 100 zeros).
  • Google Inc. was officially founded on September 4, 1998, often treated as the date Google “came out” as a company.
  • The early company operated out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, which has become part of Google lore.

If you’re thinking of “when did Google come out” as in “when did the search engine become a real company, open to the public,” the widely accepted date is September 4, 1998.

TL;DR: Google came out as a company on September 4, 1998, after evolving from a Stanford research project called BackRub a few years earlier.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.