Google turns 28: How a search engine started by two Stanford students grew into Gmail, YouTube, Android and Gemini AI

Google is celebrating its 28th birthday today, September 27, 2026, marking another year since the search engine was founded by Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company has marked the occasion with its annual birthday celebration on its homepage, drawing attention to the date that has become associated with Google's anniversary.What began as a research project to organise information on the growing World Wide Web has developed into a technology ecosystem spanning search, email, maps, online video, mobile operating systems, web browsers and artificial intelligence.How Google beganPage and Brin began working on a search engine project at Stanford in the late 1990s. The project was initially called “BackRub” and used an algorithm known as PageRank to rank web pages based on their links and relevance.The name was later changed to Google, a reference to “googol”, the mathematical term for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, 1998, after receiving an initial $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. September 27 was later adopted as the company's birthday.Gmail, Maps and YouTube changed Google's reachGoogle's expansion accelerated after its initial public offering in 2004. That year, it launched Gmail, initially offering 1 GB of free storage.Google Maps followed in 2005, adding an online mapping and navigation service to the company's growing portfolio.In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Two years later, it launched the Google Chrome web browser and introduced Android as an open-source mobile operating system.From Google to AlphabetGoogle underwent a major corporate restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc. as its parent company. Sundar Pichai became Google's CEO as part of the restructuring.The change separated Google's core internet businesses from several other ventures operating under the wider Alphabet structure.Google's shift towards artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence has become a major focus for Google in recent years. The company developed machine learning technologies including BERT, which improved the way its systems understood language and search queries.Google later expanded its generative AI efforts through the Gemini family of models. The technology is designed to work across different types of information and supports tasks including reasoning, coding and content creation.AI has also increasingly become part of Google's search products and other services.Google and educationGoogle's products have also become part of everyday learning and teaching. Google Scholar provides access to academic literature, while Google Classroom is used by schools and educators to manage assignments, lessons and communication.YouTube has also become a major source of educational videos, lectures and tutorials covering subjects ranging from school-level lessons to specialised academic topics.Twenty-eight years after its launch, Google is marking its birthday with a company that now stretches far beyond its original search engine, from Gmail and YouTube to Android and its growing range of AI products.Get the latest Education News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.