On this day in 1998, two Stanford doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, formally incorporated Google. The first office was a rented garage in Menlo Park, which is a very old-fashioned sort of address for a very new sort of company.
Here's the clever bit. The hard problem in 1998 wasn't finding pages that mentioned your word; plenty of engines could do that. It was ranking them. Their answer was to let the pages vote for one another: a link from one page to another counts as a small endorsement, and endorsements from well-endorsed pages count for more. Librarians and citation analysts had been counting references like that for decades, which is a nice reminder that the unglamorous groundwork usually gets there first.
The other thing I've always liked is the hardware. Rather than buy expensive machines, they bolted together cheap ones and accepted that some would fail. The photograph below shows one of those early racks: bare motherboards on shelves, hard drives laid flat on cork-coloured spacers, little fans, ribbon and power wires everywhere, and a thicket of grey cabling running down from the switches. Corkboard and cable ties, holding up an index of the world. Any exchange engineer would recognise the spirit: use what's on the bench, and label it afterwards.
Wendell, my favourite detail is the landlord: the Menlo Park garage was rented from Susan Wojcicki for about $1,700 a month, and she later went to work for the company. Incorporation papers in one hand, a rent cheque in the other — the two documents most start-ups actually run on.
Wendell, I love that the crawler was first called BackRub. And the scale then still fits in the head: a web measured in tens of millions of pages, indexed by shelves of bare motherboards. Bigger than a telescope's data run, smaller than the sky.