Innovation & Wealth › The information age › The internet
Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin)
founded September 1998· Company or fortune· Companies & fortunes
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine that ranked pages by their links, then made it the world's largest ad business.
See it on the Innovation & Wealth map →What happened
Their PageRank method treated each link to a page as a vote, beating rivals like AltaVista. Google incorporated in September 1998, working from a Menlo Park garage. From 2000 it sold small text ads matched to searches, priced by auction from 2002; ads still bring most revenue. It went public in 2004, bought Android (2005) and YouTube (2006), and reorganized as Alphabet in 2015. Page and Brin each have fortunes estimated above $100 billion; estimates vary.
Impact on society and the economy
It made information free to find and gave advertisers precise targeting, while newspapers lost ad income. In 2024 a US court ruled it an illegal search monopoly.
How we know
Brin and Page's 1998 research paper, Google's IPO filing and annual reports, and the US v. Google rulings (liability 2024, remedies 2025).
Still debated
Whether AI chatbots will erode Google search, and whether the court's 2025 remedies, which did not force a sale of Chrome, are enough, remain open.
Connections (3)
▸United States v. Microsoft left room for rivals like Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin)Debated
The connection
The case and 2001 settlement made Microsoft wary of using Windows to crush new rivals. Many observers argue this let Google grow in search, and later with its Chrome browser, without Microsoft smothering it as it had Netscape. Google later faced its own monopoly case, which leaned heavily on the Microsoft precedent.
When and how
US, 1998–2010s. Google was founded in 1998, the year the suit was filed; court oversight of Microsoft ran until 2011.
How sure are we?
The claim rests on industry testimony and scholars' arguments, not direct evidence; Judge Amit Mehta's 2024 ruling against Google cited the Microsoft case heavily.
Debates
Skeptics argue Microsoft simply misjudged search and Google would have thrived regardless; the what-if cannot be tested.
▸Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) published the transformer research behind The AI boom: from deep learning to ChatGPTWell documented
The connection
In 2017 eight Google researchers published 'Attention Is All You Need,' describing the transformer, a design that reads whole passages at once and improves with more data and chips. OpenAI's GPT, short for 'generative pre-trained transformer,' and nearly every later chatbot use it. Yet OpenAI, not Google, launched the first hit chatbot.
When and how
Google Brain in Mountain View, 2017; authors included Ashish Vaswani and Noam Shazeer; all eight eventually left Google, though Shazeer later returned.
How we know
The paper is among the most cited in computer science, with over 100,000 citations, and OpenAI's GPT papers build on it explicitly.
Debates
Why Google, which invented the core method, was slow to ship a chatbot: caution about errors, or fear of undercutting its search-ad business.
▸Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) was ruled a monopolist in Antitrust cases against Google, Meta, Amazon and AppleWell documented
The connection
Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally kept its search monopoly, about 90% of US searches, partly by paying Apple, Samsung and others over $26 billion in 2021 to be the default. In September 2025 he declined to force a sale of Chrome but barred exclusive deals and ordered some data sharing.
When and how
Federal courts in Washington, D.C. (search, filed 2020) and Alexandria, Virginia (ad tech, filed 2023, monopoly found April 2025); the Justice Department with state attorneys general.
How we know
The court opinions are public and cite Google's internal emails and the default payments; Google said it would appeal.
Debates
Whether the search remedies, widely seen as mild, change anything, especially as AI chatbots compete with search; some critics say the fix came too late.