What year was Google officially incorporated?

Google was officially incorporated in 1998. Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing the search engine while they were graduate students at Stanford University, initially calling it BackRub. The project ranked pages partly by analyzing links between them, a method that helped distinguish it from many earlier search engines.

On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin incorporated Google as a company. The name Google is a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize an enormous amount of information. The company’s first office was a rented garage in Menlo Park, California.

A common mix-up is confusing Google’s incorporation date with the launch of its search engine or its later anniversary celebrations. Google’s search technology existed before the company was incorporated, and the company has often marked its birthday on September 27 rather than September 4. The corporate milestone, however, remains September 4, 1998.