Quiz of the Day
The Internet & Tech Giants
Friday, 4 September 2026
Google was founded on 4 Sep 1998 — a romp through search engines, Silicon Valley, the web's history and the companies that built it.
1. In what year was Google officially founded?
- 2000
- 1996
- 1998
- 2004
Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California, belonging to Susan Wojcicki, who would later become CEO of YouTube. The company had begun as a Stanford research project a couple of years earlier. Google's initial public offering came in 2004.
2. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met while attending which university?
- MIT
- Berkeley
- Harvard
- Stanford
Page and Brin met as graduate students at Stanford University in the mid-1990s. Their research project on ranking web pages by their links eventually became Google's search engine. Stanford holds the original patent on the PageRank algorithm, and Google licensed it from the university.
3. Before settling on the name 'Google,' what was Page and Brin's search engine originally called?
- PageFinder
- WebCrawler
- BackRub
- SearchMaster
The original search engine was named 'BackRub' because it analysed the web's 'back links' to rank pages. It ran on Stanford's servers until its bandwidth demands grew too large. The founders later renamed it Google, a play on the mathematical term 'googol.'
4. The name 'Google' is a play on which mathematical term meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros?
- Exponent
- Googol
- Infinity
- Gigabyte
A 'googol' is the number 10 raised to the 100th power, coined by a nine-year-old boy, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, around 1920. The name was meant to reflect the founders' mission to organise a seemingly infinite amount of information. A misspelling of the word ended up sticking as the company's name.
5. Who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989?
- Vint Cerf
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Bill Gates
- Steve Jobs
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 and built the first website in 1991. He created the core technologies of HTML, HTTP, and URLs. Crucially, he gave the web away for free, refusing to patent it so that anyone could use it.
6. At which research organization did Tim Berners-Lee invent the World Wide Web?
- Bell Labs
- NASA
- DARPA
- CERN
Berners-Lee developed the web while working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. He originally designed it to help scientists share documents across different computer systems. The world's first website, dedicated to explaining the web itself, went live on a CERN computer in 1991.
7. When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, what did the company originally sell?
- Electronics
- Music
- Books
- Groceries
Amazon launched in 1994 as an online bookstore, chosen because books were easy to ship and had a huge catalogue no physical store could match. Bezos famously started the company out of his garage in Washington state. He named it after the Amazon River, the largest river in the world, signalling his ambitions for scale.
8. Which company did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-found in 1976?
- IBM
- Apple
- Microsoft
- Atari
Apple was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and lesser-known third co-founder Ronald Wayne. Wayne sold his 10 percent stake just days later for 800 dollars, a stake that would eventually be worth billions. Their first product, the Apple I, was a hand-built circuit board designed by Wozniak.
9. Microsoft was co-founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and which childhood friend?
- Steve Wozniak
- Steve Ballmer
- Gordon Moore
- Paul Allen
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975, initially to write software for the early Altair 8800 microcomputer. The two had been friends since their school days in Seattle. Allen is credited with coming up with the company's name, a blend of 'microcomputer' and 'software.'
10. Facebook was launched in 2004 from a dorm room at which university?
- Yale
- Columbia
- Harvard
- Princeton
Mark Zuckerberg launched 'TheFacebook' in February 2004 from his Harvard dorm room. It was initially restricted to Harvard students before expanding to other universities and then the general public. The 'The' was dropped from the name in 2005 after the company purchased the domain facebook.com.
11. Which programmer chose the '@' symbol to separate the user from the host in email addresses in 1971?
- Vint Cerf
- Robert Kahn
- Ray Tomlinson
- Leonard Kleinrock
Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two computers over ARPANET in 1971 and picked the '@' symbol because it was already on the keyboard and rarely used in names. He later admitted he had no memory of what the very first test messages actually said. The '@' has since become one of the most recognisable symbols of the digital age.
12. In 2006, Google acquired which fast-growing video-sharing website for roughly $1.65 billion?
- Twitch
- Dailymotion
- Vimeo
- YouTube
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for about 1.65 billion dollars in stock, less than two years after the site was founded by three former PayPal employees. At the time, some critics thought the price was wildly excessive. YouTube is now one of the most visited websites in the world and a cornerstone of Google's business.
13. What does the 'HTTP' at the start of a web address stand for?
- High Transfer Text Protocol
- Hyperlink Text Transport Process
- HyperText Transfer Protocol
- Home Text Transfer Protocol
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, the set of rules governing how web browsers and servers exchange information. It was designed by Tim Berners-Lee as part of his original web project. The secure version, HTTPS, adds encryption so that data cannot easily be intercepted in transit.
14. In 2015, Google reorganized itself as a subsidiary under which new parent holding company?
- Meta
- Nexus
- Waymo
- Alphabet
In 2015, Google created a parent company called Alphabet to separate its core internet business from experimental ventures like self-driving cars and life-sciences research. Co-founder Larry Page became Alphabet's first CEO. The name was chosen partly as a nod to language, one of humanity's most important innovations, and to the idea of an 'alpha bet,' or investment above benchmark returns.
15. The first message sent over ARPANET in 1969 was meant to be 'LOGIN,' but the system crashed after which two letters?
- "lo"
- "li"
- "lg"
- "og"
On October 29, 1969, a student at UCLA tried to send the word 'LOGIN' to a computer at Stanford, but the system crashed after transmitting just 'l' and 'o.' This accidental first message, 'lo,' has been remembered as a fittingly biblical 'lo!' heralding the internet age. ARPANET, funded by the US Defense Department, was the direct ancestor of today's internet.