Google buys house where it all began

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 3 (UPI) -- The Google corporation has purchased the Menlo Park, Calif., house where the world's biggest search engine made its debut in the two-car garage in 1998.

For an undisclosed price, Google bought the four-bedroom house where Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed and launched their newly incorporated company on a start-up check for $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reported.

In the summer of 1998 when the first Google servers began working at 232 Santa Margarita Ave., it served 10,000 queries per day. This July, its sites served 366 million searches, the report.

"We plan to preserve the property as part of our living legacy. We don't have any plans at this time to open it to the public," a Google spokeswoman told the newspaper.

Neighbor Joan Pelletier, who lives two doors down, said the news explained a mystery.

"People did sit in that garage an awful lot," Pelletier said to the Mercury News. "Now I know why they had sofas in there."