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September 3, 2024

— Larry Page, co-founder of Google

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You might think it's great

What were you doing in 1998?

For nearly 50 million Americans, I suppose it's a trick question -- they weren't even born yet. But we know what at least two young people (young then, anyway) were doing: Larry Page and Sergey Brin were starting Google.

The pair formed the company on September 4 of that year. Google celebrates its birthday every year with a series of Google Doodles and articles on its homepage.

I know obviously that the near-universal admiration of Google that the company (technically Alphabet now) saw in its early days is now a relic of the past.

Still, by the numbers, it's impressive as heck: $2 trillion market capitalization, more than 190,000 employees as of the end of last year, along with a few other stats that Google itself highlighted:

70 billion: average daily views on YouTube Shorts;

10 million+: miles mapped with Google Street View cars -- "enough to circle the world more than 400 times;" and

Infinity: the theoretical limit to the number of tabs you can open on a Chrome browser at once. "That's right, the limit does not exist!"

Bu, I think there is another series of statistics, milestones, and contextual references that also stand out. These are the sort that show what the world was like back in 1998, and thus why the success of Google was such an unlikely outcome. Here are a few:

Fewer than half of American adults even used the internet.

This is a good one to start with. A Pew Research study conducted around the time Google was incorporated found that only 4 in 10 Americans used the internet at all.

Moreover, 57 percent of those who didn't use it said they worried "not at all" that they might be missing something.

Internet use was just being linked to loneliness.

Literally days before Google launched, a tech-funded study found that people who used the internet for "even just a few hours a week" wound up with "higher levels of depression and loneliness."

The results ran "completely contrary" to the expectations of its principals -- to say nothing of its funders, who had hoped the study would show zero correlation between internet use and poor mental health.

The dot-com bubble had yet to burst.

Google really was early in one sense: the internet 1.0 stock market was booming, and yet many of the most famous companies of our current era hadn't even launched.

Example: Pets.com, where the entire business model was selling very heavy bags of pet food on a low margin -- but with free shipping -- didn't even launch until the next month.

A government report broke the internet.

Yes, this was the Starr Report, officially the "Referral from Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr in Conformity with the Requirement of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c)" report, about Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton.

About 20 million people read it, which was then "the single highest number of people who have ever used the computer to access a single document," according to an analyst. (That would be a marginally viral TikTok video now.)

People weren't even sure search engines would work.

Google wasn't the first search engine; it was preceded by Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, Dogpile, and many others. Yet many big media ventures still believed they could corner the market for attention on the internet.

If that sounds anachronistic now, check out how a year-end summary put it back then: "Companies engage in a mad rush to launch their own 'portals,' gateways to the net for consumers."

Microsoft was embroiled in its Justice Department antitrust case.

It seems like ancient history, but Microsoft was in the middle of what would become a landmark antitrust case, leading to a sweeping settlement with the U.S. government in 2001.

Lo and behold, Microsoft was basically the same age then that Google is now -- as Google itself is defending a Justice Department antitrust case.

From garage to today.

Look, the vast majority of business ideas never get off the ground, and yet Google, which has a literal "started in a garage" origin story, became an icon. Heck, even the fact that the company is defending itself against the Justice Department is sort of a "good problem" when you look at it in the context of a company that was once a startup.

But whether you love Google or think of it as a giant empire that long ago did away with "don't be evil," it's worth remembering.

Oh, and we need a quote. I like this one a lot from Larry Page, because it's both a bit inspiring, but also just wild and weird when it's taken out of context like this:

I admit, I wanted to use "Don't be evil." But that seems so anachronistic now that nobody would even believe it.

We're still on Low Power Mode, and I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. Don't forget we have two newsletters now!

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