Google sold its shares the way you sell a painting: by auction. Wall Street banks usually picked who got stock in a hot offering. Larry Page and Sergey Brin let ordinary investors bid online instead. In 2004 the dot-com crash was still a fresh bruise, and tech offerings were rare. Google arrived with a famous search box, a fast-growing ad business, and a pair of founders who wanted to go public on their own terms.

A Garage in Menlo Park

Page and Brin met as PhD students at Stanford. Their search engine ranked a web page by how many other pages linked to it, and by how important those pages were. In September 1998 they founded Google and set up in a friend's garage in Menlo Park. The bet was that better answers would win users, and that small text ads next to those answers could pay for everything. The company grew up in Mountain View, California.

The Dutch Auction

Google first hoped for $108 to $135 a share. Demand from the auction came in lower, and the stock priced at $85 on August 18, 2004. It began trading on Nasdaq the next day and closed near $100, up about 18 percent. In 2015 Google reorganized under a new parent company called Alphabet. Sundar Pichai became Google's chief executive that October. Alphabet still trades on Nasdaq under the ticker GOOGL.

Cover: Searching for Fireflies, Suzuki Harunobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a lantern held out into the dark night, searching for fireflies (search).