On what date was Google founded as a company?

Google was founded as a company on September 4, 1998.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google in California after developing a search engine as Stanford University graduate students. Their early project was first known as BackRub, a name referring to its analysis of links pointing to webpages.

The company’s 1998 founding date is often confused with other important Google milestones. Page and Brin began collaborating on the search project in 1996, and Google’s initial public offering took place in 2004. The corporate founding therefore came between the research project and the stock-market debut.

In 2015, Google became the largest subsidiary of the newly created holding company Alphabet Inc. Sundar Pichai became Google’s chief executive in that restructuring, while Larry Page became Alphabet’s CEO. The founding date still refers to the creation of Google itself, not Alphabet’s later formation.