In what year was the domain name “google.com” registered? The answer is 1997.
The domain was registered on September 15, 1997, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while their Stanford search project was evolving from an earlier system called BackRub. The name Google was inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros.
The date is often confused with 1998 because Google Inc. was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998. Those are separate milestones: the domain existed before the company was incorporated, and the search engine’s public growth accelerated around that later date.
Google’s first index and server experiments began at Stanford in the mid-1990s. Registering google.com gave the project a recognizable identity just before the company’s official launch and helped establish the brand that would become synonymous with web search.