Google at 25: How the search engine reshaped the world – and is about to do it all over again

The search giant has played a defining role in the development of the internet, writes Andrew Griffin. As it heads into its second quarter century it faces a fight to show we should trust it with our artificial intelligence-inspired futures

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Google was founded 25 years ago, with a mission that is both simple and impossible: "To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". In the years since, its attempt to do that has changed the world fundamentally – and it might be about to do so again.

The search giant has changed in profound ways since it announced that mission. It has gone from a tiny garage to a vast "Googleplex" in Mountain View, California, and it has dropped other seemingly central tenets like its famous "don't be evil" motto. But it has never forgotten its commitment to organise the world’s information, even as both the information and the organisation has changed and grown.

Google began in 1995, at Stanford University, when student Sergey Brin was showing around Larry Page, who was considering graduate study there. At the time, the internet was a mess: there was already plenty of pages on it, but little way of finding information from across them. From their dorm rooms, Page and Brin built a system that organised websites depending on links: the system was called PageRank, and the search engine was called Backrub.