How Old is Google? Statistics and Facts (2025)
Updated · Sep 15, 2025
Table of Contents
Introduction
How Old is Google?: Google has set the way we used to find information into something that has become a need for many people. Be it answering basic questions or powering higher AI models, Google has grown into the most powerful search engine worldwide.
But what is the age of Google? This article attempts to explore Google’s age through statistics, percentages, and landmark events in an accessible manner.
Editor’s Choice
- Google was founded on September 4, 1998. This will make it 26 years old by 2025.
- The company originated as a research project at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
- In 2000, the company introduced AdWords, now Google Ads, which soon became the company’s biggest revenue source.
- By the end of 2000, the daily search count on Google had crossed the billion mark.
- Gmail was launched in 2004, with 1 GB of free storage, while the company went public at US$85 per share, raising US$1.66 billion.
- Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65 billion, and YouTube presently generates over 13% of Google’s revenues.
- Under the new parent company, Alphabet Inc., Google, in 2015, restructured to govern many ventures.
- By 2024, Google had 150,000-plus employees and a market capitalisation above US$1 trillion.
- Google’s 2024 revenues totalled US$348.16 billion, primarily from advertising, with US$234.23 billion coming from ads served at Google Sites.
- Google Search dropped to 78.8% desktop market share in January 2025, the lowest it has been for over 15 years.
- Major algorithm updates include Panda (2011), Penguin (2012), Hummingbird (2013), BERT (2019), and Page Experience (2021), all focused on feeding searchers with relevant answers and on a good user experience.
How Old is Google?
Google was officially founded on September 4, 1998, so by 2025, it will have turned 26 years old. It was all about changing how information was organised and accessed on the internet.
The Beginning of Google
- The idea for Google began in 1995 when Page and Brin developed a search algorithm named “BackRub.”
- The system ranked Web Pages based on how many links there were pointing to a page and the quality of those links-an innovative way to gauge how relevant those Web Pages were.
- In 1997, the project got rechristened as “Google,” which was borrowed from the mathematical term “googol” that stands for 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- The word truly went in tandem with their mission of organising seemingly infinite online information.
- On September 4, 1998, however, the founding date of Google Inc. was stamped while the company set up its first office in a garage in Menlo Park, California.
- The rest is history: the company would later grow to be the largest and most widely used search engine.
Key Milestones In Google’s History
Once only a simply conceived search engine from a garage, Google has now become a global major tech enterprise; the journey has been one of innovation, acquisition, and technology upgrades. It would be interesting to recall some of Google’s key historical milestones:
1998 – Google Is Founded
- On September 4, 1998, Google Inc. was officially incorporated.
- It was in a garage in Menlo Park that Larry Page and Sergey Brin initiated the first version of the Google search system, which soon grew to become the most-used search platform across the world.
2000 – Google Ads & Global Expansion
- Similarly, Google also launched AdWords or Google Ads, enabling businesses to advertise online, transforming the digital advertising domain, and becoming one of the biggest sources of income for the company.
- By late 2000, Google was handling over a billion searches per day and would go on to become the most widely used search engine all over the world.
2004 – Gmail and Going Public
- Coming soon on April 1, 2004, Google gave birth to Gmail, a free email service with storage space unheard of: 1GB, in those days.
- Later that year, an IPO was done for US$85 a share, raising a staggering US$1.66 billion and hugely impacting the valuation of the company.
2006 – The YouTube Buyout
- Google bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion in order to gain supremacy in the fast-growing online video content world.
- This was a highly strategic move, as YouTube later dominated online video and became one of the pillars of Google’s business.
2015 – Google Becomes Alphabet Inc.
- This marked a major corporate restructuring, wherein Google was transformed into a subsidiary of a new parent company called Alphabet Inc.
- This corporate repositioning allowed the company to separate its core business (search, ads, YouTube, etc.) from other experimental ventures such as self-driving cars, healthcare tech, and smart home devices.
2023 – Search Powered by AI
- AI power was introduced into search, yet stronger because it makes search results more relevant and quicker.
- These features included voice-based search, contextual understanding, and generative AI capabilities to allow the user to get instant personalised and intelligent responses.
2025 – Latest Innovations
By 2025, Google will have gone further with high-end technologies:
- Multimodal Search: Users can search across text, image, and video modalities all at the same time to give the most effective and deep results.
- Google Gemini Integration: There is parallel integration of Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, into search and productivity tools such as Android, Docs, and Calendar.
- Zero-Click Results: Google tries to answer directly on the search page and offers fewer click-throughs to other sites.
- Enhanced Privacy Controls: You can now be more in control of your search history, limit tracking, personalise AI tools, and manage data with better security in hand.
Key Algorithm Updates By Google
At various points in time, Google has altered the search the very system that it uses to rank websites in search results. These algorithmic updates seek to ensure that the user is given relevant information of the highest quality and the most trustworthy. Some key updates are:
2011 – Panda Update
- This update intends to reward good content and down-rank websites of low quality or “thin” content, like sites that have copied or spammy content.
2012 – Penguin Update
- The Penguin said goodbye to unnatural or spammy link profiles for websites, penalising any site that tried to augment its ranking by purchasing links or by other dodgy practices.
2013 – Hummingbird Update
- Hummingbird improved Google’s ability to analyse the meaning behind a search query rather than merely looking at individual words.
- This update was significantly beneficial for providing more conversational and accurate search results.
2019 – BERT Update
- BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) brought advanced NLP to help Google comprehend the general context in which a particular word is used in a sentence.
- Thus, it elevates the precision of results for queries that were complex or long.
The 2021 update
- The update mainly concerned Google Page Experience, which includes factors such as page loading speed, mobile-friendliness, security (HTTPS), and loading stability.
- Google began to rank websites not just for content but also for the pleasure of using them.
Google – Statistics And Trends
- By 2024, Google will no longer be a mere search engine; it will be a technology giant with a presence worldwide. Here are a few important facts:
- Google has around 150,000 employees in different parts of the world, working in various fields including search, advertising, AI, cloud computing, and hardware.
- Google, through Alphabet Inc., is worth over US$1 trillion, surpassing US$1,000,000,000,000, one of the most valuable companies globally.
- Even at the age of 26 in 2025, Google remained one of the most innovative companies in the world, especially in AI, search technology, cloud services, and consumer products.
- The company has constantly updated its algorithms and tools in an endeavour to provide faster, smarter, helpful results everywhere across the globe. Since 1997, perhaps longer, it has been considered the leading online search engine-gathering information fast and effortlessly.
- Google is based in California and also does business in online advertising, cloud computing, and software.
- Serious challenges NSA-keeping has now faced Google since AI has altered how online search is done.
- Google’s revenues in 2024 were astronomical, at US$348.16 billion! These came chiefly from advertising.
- Google Sites ads gave US$234.23 billion, but ad revenues from Google network websites fell to US$30.36 billion, a decrease from the previous year.
- As of January 2025, Google Search held the global desktop search market share of 78.8%, which is the lowest it has ever been in more than 15 years.
- AI-based tools, especially OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have enhanced and challenged Google’s long-standing grip on the online search market.
- Google first branded itself as an “AI-first company” back in 2016, but it has only just now begun to play catch-up with others, after finally launching its new AI assistant, Gemini.
- To keep its foothold, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is now heavily investing in AI and machine learning.
- Over the years, the company has slowly bloomed into much more than a simple search facility.
- It had bought the video-streaming giant YouTube in 2006, which now reportedly provides over 13% of Google’s total revenue.
- The Android operating system was created by Google and had a share of over 72% in the global smartphone OS market as of 2024.
- Other important products include Google Play, Chrome browser, ChromeOS, Google Pay, Chromecast, and its hardware lineup.
- There is still another source of revenue, composed of Google Cloud along with subscriptions, platforms, and devices.
Conclusion
Initiated as a small project at Stanford in 1996 and having crossed its 27th year in 2025, Google gradually expanded over almost three decades to become a tech giant, rising from millions to billions of dollars while almost monopolising the world’s search queries.
Its evolution, from the name BackRub to that of a trillion-dollar-plus company, stands as a monument to the power of innovation and scale.
FAQ.
In 2025, Google will be 26 years old. It officially came into existence on 4th September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were students working on their PhDs at Stanford University.
Google started as a research project called “BackRub” in 1995, which aimed to improve the way information was organised online by giving preferential rankings to web pages based on the quantity and quality of links.
Global traction came to Google in 2000 after AdWords was launched, and daily searches crossed the 1 billion mark. Its growth rate accelerated after it went public in 2004 and after it acquired YouTube in 2006.
In 2025, innovations include multimodal search (text, image, video), a deeper integration of the Gemini AI assistant, zero-click search results, and more privacy user controls.
Updates considered significant are Panda (2011), Penguin (2012), Hummingbird (2013), BERT (2019), and Page Experience (2021); all of them, for better content quality, relevance, and user experience.
Barry Elad is a tech enthusiast who loves diving deep into various technology topics. He gathers important statistics and facts to help others understand the tech world better. With a keen interest in software, Barry writes about its benefits and how it can improve our daily lives. In his spare time, he enjoys experimenting with healthy recipes, practicing yoga, meditating, or taking nature walks with his child. Barry’s goal is to make complex tech information easy and accessible for everyone.
