Google incorporated September 4, 1998

On September 4th, 1998, Google incorporated in California. Even if you are not a fan, and make no mistake, I am not, you have to admit Google left its mark on the Internet. It fundamentally changed the Internet in numerous ways, some of them bad, but some of them very good.

Google’s highly anticipated 2004 IPO valued the company at over $23 billion and it marked the beginning of the recovery from the dotcom bust.

What early Google was like

The original Google page was spartan and mostly text-based so it loaded and rendered quickly, even on a slow dialup connection. The original Google doodle bears some resemblance to the current logo, but the font was different and it originally had an exclamation point. Yahoo, one of the most popular pages on the web at the time, also had an exclamation point in its logo.

I have a hard time thinking of Google as retro, but its 1998 page looks pretty retro to me when I look at it now.

Google’s original premise

Google fundamentally changed the way search engines work. Before Google, search engines measured quality by the number of pages they indexed. But when you searched, there was no guarantee the thing you would be looking for would be on the first page of results. It could just as easily be buried on page 11. Being good at searching really required you to use positive and negative operators to narrow the search to a manageable number of results.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had an idea when they were studying computer science at Stanford University: tracking the number of other pages that were linking to each page. The theory was incoming links were a way to measure page quality. So Google ranked pages that way and displayed them in that order. This provided a better experience then simply displaying results in random order would give.

Page and Brin received the Marconi Prize for this algorithm in 2004.

It was easy to game this system by simply asking people to link to your page, or paying them to do so, so the Google algorithm needed constant tweaking. But the theory was very sound. Your chances of quickly finding what you were looking for were much higher if you used Google. Before Google, the best search engine was the one whose operators you knew how to use to fine-tune the results. It didn’t take long for Google to overtake Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Webcrawler, and all the other early entrants by providing better results without fine-tuning than they were giving you with fine-tuning.

Catching on

Word traveled fast about this new search engine. If you were around and online during this era and weren’t using Google by mid-1999, you were missing out on things.

Google’s other innovation was running its operation on a massive cluster of Linux servers. Google was nowhere near the first organization to use Linux as a web server, but they were one of the first to use it on such a large scale and announce they were doing it. Other companies like Amazon were doing it too, but they didn’t advertise it.

This was still controversial in some circles. At least it was in the circles I worked in. I argued then, and now, that they were listening to Microsoft too much, and Microsoft had a vested interest in selling you Windows NT. Never mind four years earlier, Windows NT was risky and unproven.

Powering its core business on Linux worked out just fine for Google, if you’re wondering. The approach validated itself on 9/11/2001, when US-based news websites were overwhelmed with traffic. Google remained fully operational, and my coworkers and I used Google to find news sources in Canada and the UK that weren’t drowning in traffic.

Modern cloud computing, a $680 billion industry, is an extension of Google’s early approach.

Where Google lost its way

I know I said I am not a fan, but I sure said a lot of very positive things in that previous section. If I said anything in that section that you could construe as negative, that was an accident. Because for a long time, Google was really great.

I don’t use Google search anymore, and I don’t use Google’s Chrome browser. I use DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo isn’t great. It’s not as good as Google was in, say, 2019. But if I am looking for content that wasn’t written by an AI or an offshore content farm, DuckDuckGo does a much better job of weeding out that kind of low quality content than Google does now. For a browser, I use and recommend Firefox.

“Don’t be evil.”

In its early days, Google’s corporate motto was “Don’t be evil.” That’s really vague and idealistic, and everyone will have their own opinion about when it was that Google abandoned that motto. But I will argue that the balance they had in 2014 was way better than the balance they have in 2024. The thing is, their profit margins were a lot lower in 2014 than they were in 2024. By having a monopoly on search and, at worst, a duopoly in Web browsers and mobile phones, and with no viable competitor to YouTube, Google has an enormous amount of information on virtually every Internet user.

At one time, Google existed to use that information to make life more convenient for that audience, the theory being profits would follow. Which they did. But at some point, Google shifted its focus to monetizing that data they have.

In 1998, I don’t think Google wanted to become the next Microsoft. But at some point, Google realized they had a chance. They took that chance, became the next Microsoft, and its investors are richer for it. But their products aren’t better for it, that’s for sure. The days of Google doing bold, disruptive, innovative, and risky things like Google Fiber and largely altruistic things like rescuing the Dejanews Usenet archive are over. And that’s a shame, but as companies get large, it also seems inevitable.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.