Google Inc. went public via an initial public offering on this day in 2004, priced at $85 per share. The company had been founded six years earlier by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, two students at Stanford, and was focused on a search engine that ranked results based on how often they were linked to. In 2000, they relaunched their project and called it Google. They began to build up a staff in Palo Alto, Calif., and built their product further until it became the primary way to find information instantly.
The company grew more and more, building other tools that would underpin a very large share of users’ online activity like the email service Gmail, which has 1.2 billion users, and the phone operating system Android, which over 3.3 billion people use. If there’s something you can do on the internet, it’s likely that Google employees had some hand in making it possible.
Read more about Google’s history on the website of marketing firm Sitecentre.
