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The Rise of Google: A 20-Part Story

The Rise of Google

How did two PhD students who couldn't stand each other build the company that organized the world's information — and reshaped how all of us live, work, and think?

This is The Rise of Google, a 20-part series tracing the whole arc: from a dorm-room research project in 1995, through the garage, the ad-money breakthrough, the record-breaking IPO, the acquisitions that defined the modern internet, and the pivot to AI. A new part publishes every day — bookmark this page to follow along.

The full series

  1. Part 1: Two Students Who Couldn't Stand Each Other — 1995: how Larry Page and Sergey Brin met — and argued about everything
  2. Part 2: BackRub: The Algorithm That Ranked the Web — How PageRank turned links into a measure of trust
  3. Part 3: From BackRub to Google — The name, the garage, and a $100,000 check written before the company existed
  4. Part 4: The Founding — Incorporation, the first employees, and a startup run out of a garage
  5. Part 5: Don't Be Evil — The culture and ethos that defined early Google
  6. Part 6: Kleiner + Sequoia — Getting two rival VCs to fund one startup (1999)
  7. Part 7: The Money Problem: AdWords Is Born — How Google finally learned to make money (2000)
  8. Part 8: AdSense and the Ad Empire — Turning the whole web into ad space (2003)
  9. Part 9: Adult Supervision — Eric Schmidt and the CEO triumvirate (2001)
  10. Part 10: The IPO — The Dutch auction that broke Wall Street's rules (2004)
  11. Part 11: The Product Explosion — Gmail, Maps, and the magic of 20% time (2004-05)
  12. Part 12: Buying YouTube — The $1.65B bet everyone doubted (2006)
  13. Part 13: Android — The quiet acquisition that won mobile
  14. Part 14: Chrome — Declaring war on the browser (2008)
  15. Part 15: Google in China — The entry, the censorship fight, and the retreat
  16. Part 16: The Machine — The secret data-center empire behind the search box
  17. Part 17: Moonshots — Google X, self-driving cars, and glorious failures
  18. Part 18: Becoming Alphabet — The 2015 restructuring nobody saw coming
  19. Part 19: The AI Pivot — DeepMind, TensorFlow, and 'AI first'
  20. Part 20: The Trillion-Dollar Giant — What Google became — and what comes next

New chapters drop daily. Start with Part 1.

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