In early 1999, two Stanford graduate students offered their search engine to one of the most popular websites in America. By one widely told account, the price was 750,000 dollars, and the answer was no. Today that search engine handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, its parent company is worth about 4 trillion dollars, and a federal judge has ruled that it is a monopolist.

This animated documentary tells how Google got there: Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, BackRub and PageRank, the sale nobody wanted, Andy Bechtolsheim's 100,000 dollar cheque to a company that did not exist yet, Susan Wojcicki's garage, the Excite rejection, AdWords and the ad auction, the 2004 auction IPO and Gmail, Android, YouTube and Chrome, the break with China, Alphabet and Sundar Pichai, the US antitrust case, and the AI race that Google's own Transformer paper started.

Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:45 The Link Hunters 2:36 For Sale 4:28 The Money Machine 6:01 Going Public 6:59 Front Doors 8:19 The Great Firewall 9:21 Alphabet 10:11 The Monopolist 11:34 Code Red 13:34 How Google Changed the Internet

Every major claim is fact-checked against company filings and blog posts, court rulings, Stanford and the Computer History Museum, and major news reporting; disputed accounts are attributed. Real people are shown as stylised illustrations, and no company logos are used.

This video includes burned-in English subtitles.

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