<P> The Google company was launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most widely used web - based search engine . Page and Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm--at first known as "BackRub"--in 1996 . The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003 . This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies . The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011, in addition to many other products . In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company, Alphabet Inc . </P> <P> The search engine went through numerous updates in attempts to combat search engine optimization abuse, provide dynamic updating of results, and make the indexing system rapid and flexible . Search results started to be personalized in 2005, and later Google Suggest autocompletion was introduced . From 2007 Universal Search provided all types of content, not just text content, in search results . </P>

When was google made available to the public