--- title: Google History: Notable Firsts From the Company's Early Days description: Sept. 4, 1998: Google is incorporated canonical: https://time.com/4011935/google-firsts/ author: Jennifer Latson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-09-04T13:00:26.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:46:20.003Z article:section: History og:title: Google History: Notable Firsts From the Company's Early Days og:description: Sept. 4, 1998: Google is incorporated og:url: https://time.com/4011935/google-firsts/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt496c9a1f39a12545/6988610b5f570fe26bb1d1c6/google.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: The Google logo is seen on a sign outside of Google Inc. hea og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google History: Notable Firsts From the Company's Early Days twitter:description: Sept. 4, 1998: Google is incorporated twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt496c9a1f39a12545/6988610b5f570fe26bb1d1c6/google.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Google 'Firsts' From the Company's Early Days > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Jennifer Latson](https://time.com/author/jennifer-latson/) ## Jennifer Latson Sep 4, 2015 1:00 PM UTC  The Google logo is seen on a sign outside of Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Aug. 6, 2004. The Google logo is seen on a sign outside of Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Aug. 6, 2004. Erin Lubin—Bloomberg News/Getty Images by [Jennifer Latson](https://time.com/author/jennifer-latson/) ## Jennifer Latson Sep 4, 2015 1:00 PM UTC Long ago (in terms of internet history), before Google aspired to design [self-driving cars](http://time.com/3903477/google-cars-grandma/) and [extend the human lifespan](http://time.com/574/google-vs-death/), it was just a search engine — albeit one that quickly rose to worldwide dominion over the web. On this day, Sept. 4, in 1998, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin [filed for incorporation](http://www.google.com/about/company/history/), motivated by the need to deposit a $100,000 check from their first investor, Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Within two years, Google had become what [TIME described](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,997761,00.html) in 2000 as “the Web’s largest and hippest search engine… \[with\] a reputation for uncanny speed and accuracy, delivering exactly what you’re looking for in a fraction of a second.” Today, considering that the corporation is now so vast it’s had to start [a whole new company](http://time.com/3991798/google-alphabet-companies/) to accommodate its many ventures, it can be hard to recall that simpler time, 17 long years ago. Here are a few Google firsts, from the search engine’s early days: **First name**: Brin and Page, classmates at Stanford, named their first web crawler BackRub. The search engine tapped into the campus’s broadband network — and its resource-draining ranking system occasionally brought the entire network crashing down, [according to _Wired_](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle.html?pg=1&topic=battelle&topic%5Fset=). “At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet,” _Wired_ notes. **First marketing push**: Page sent out the first issue of the “Google Friends” newsletter on April 29, 1998; it was meant both to update users on new features and to solicit feedback. The [May 1998 edition noted](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mi9499X4L9EJ:https://e127f.azurewebsites.net/googlefriends/may1998.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us): “As you have probably noticed we have made some interface changes (improvements?) over the past couple weeks… Google has now been up for over a month with the current database and we would like to hear back from you. How do you like the search results? What do you think of the new logo and formatting? Do the new features work for you?” The email newsletter circulated monthly for 13 years until it was [retired in 2011](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/29/google-retires-13-year-old-google-friends-newsletter/). Google’s oldest friends were encouraged to find updates instead on the Google Blog or its Twitter accounts. (Feedback was no longer actively solicited.) **First doodle:** The earliest [Google Doodle](http://www.google.com/doodles#archive) was meant merely as an [out-of-office message](http://www.cnet.com/pictures/our-favorite-google-doodles-through-the-years-pictures/). At the end of August in 1998, Brin and Page went to Burning Man, [as they do](http://www.fastcompany.com/3016397/how-ceos-do-burning-man), so they inserted a stick figure — the Burning Man logo — on their homepage to let users know they’d be unavailable for a few days. **First reviews**: After Google took Stanford by storm, the buzz quickly carried throughout “the cloistered world of academic Web research,” per _Wired —_ and then beyond. _PC Magazine_ [reviewed the search engine](http://web.archive.org/web/19991002011911/http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,368238,00.html) favorably in November of 1998 (when Google was still using an exclamation point in its name, à la Yahoo!), writing that it “helps you access the most relevant finds more quickly, and rivals Yahoo! for finding that handful of key sites you may be looking for.” Six months later, [TIME concluded](http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,24082,00.html) that Google had surpassed Yahoo! — although it lumped Google in with the now non-existent [FAST](http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-to-buy-fast-search-for-123-billion-13082), calling the pair “a new generation of search services … armed with next-generation technology, \[who\] say they have the power to supplant their elders and finally make sense of the Web.” **_Read an early article about Google, here in the TIME archives_**: [In Search of Google](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,997761,00.html) ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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