Google is generally considered “born” on 4 September 1998, when Google Inc. was officially founded in a garage in Menlo Park, California, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Quick Scoop: When was Google born?

If you think of “when was Google born” as the moment it became a real company (and not just a student project), the key date is:

  • 4 September 1998 – Google Inc. is incorporated as a company in California, often treated as Google’s “birthday”.

However, there are a couple of other “early life” milestones that people sometimes mean:

  • 1996 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin start their search engine research project at Stanford, initially called “BackRub”.
  • September 1997 – The domain name google.com is registered, as the project shifts from BackRub to “Google”.

So, in everyday talk:

  • If you ask “when was Google born?” most tech histories point to 4 September 1998 as Google’s birth as a company.
  • If you mean “when did the idea start?”, then its roots go back to 1996 at Stanford, with the google.com name appearing in 1997.

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