Google is world's most powerful 10-year-old

But some rivals are determined to thwart Google. TV and movie conglomerate Viacom Inc. is suing Google for $1 billion for alleged copyright infringement at YouTube, while Microsoft signaled how desperately it wants to topple Google by offering to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion this year.

Microsoft withdrew the takeover bid in a dispute over Yahoo's value, but some analysts still think those two companies may get together if they fall farther behind Google.

The notion that Microsoft — the richest technology company — would spend so much time worrying about Google seemed inconceivable in September 1998, when Page and Brin decided to convert their research project in Stanford University's computer science graduate program into a formal company.

Page, a University of Michigan graduate, and Brin, a University of Maryland alum, began working on a search engine — originally called BackRub — in 1996 because they believed a lot of important content wasn't being found on the Web. At the time, the companies behind the Internet's major search engines — Yahoo, AltaVista and Excite — were increasingly focused on building multifaceted Web sites.

Internet search was considered such a low priority at the time that Page and Brin couldn't even find anyone willing to pay a couple of million dollars to buy their technology. Instead, they got a $100,000 investment from one of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s co-founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, and filed incorporation papers so they could cash a check made out to Google Inc. In a nod to their geeky roots as children of computer science and math professors, Page and Brin had derived the name from the mathematical term "googol" — a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google still feeling lucky at 10 Humble start: Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on Sept. 7, 1998, after unsuccessfully trying to sell their search engine for a couple of million dollars. They set up shop in their Stanford dorm rooms with just four computers before moving their headquarters to a garage owned by Brin's future sister-in-law. Huge impact: Google has become an indispensable tool for millions of people and an advertising gold mine. The company has a market value of about $150 billion, making Brin and Page the world's richest people under 40. Next Act: Google is determined to become even more ingrained in everyday life during the next decade as it expands its services on cell phones and other media while trying to engineer improvements in energy, medical records and computing.

Later they would raise a total of about $26 million from family, friends and venture capitalists to help fund the company and pay for now-famous employee perks like free meals and snacks.

Even after Google became an official company in 1998, the business continued to operate out of the founders' Stanford dorm rooms.

Like Google's stripped-down home page, the company itself had a bare-bones aesthetic. Page's room was converted into a "server farm" for the three computers that ran the search engine, which then processed about 10,000 requests per day compared with about 1.5 billion per day now. The headquarters were in Brin's room in a neighboring dorm hall, where the founders and Silverstein wrestled for control of another computer to bang out programming code.

Within a few weeks after incorporating, Google moved into the garage of a Menlo Park, Calif., home owned by Susan Wojcicki, who became a Google executive and is now Brin's sister-in-law (Google bought the house in 2006). Even back in 1998, there was some free food — usually bags of M&Ms and Silverstein's homemade bread.

Jump back to today: The company occupies a 1.5 million-square-foot headquarters called the "Googleplex" — as well as two dozen other U.S. offices and hubs in more than 30 other countries. And its search engine — believed to index at least 40 billion Web pages — now runs on hundreds of thousands of computers kept in massive data centers around the world.

The growth dumbfounds Silverstein, whose only goal when he started was to help make Google successful enough to employ 80 people.

"It's natural when a company gets big that some people become fearful of that," Silverstein said. "All we can do is to be as upfront and straightforward as possible. We are not trying to be malicious or have some sneaky plan to put you in our thrall. There are some people who will never believe that."

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