The two timestamps
Both dates come from the official registry records, not from memory or marketing:
- teas.co.uk: registered on 26 March 1997 at 21:04:33 UTC.
- google.com: registered on 15 September 1997 at 04:00:00 UTC.
Count the days between them and you get 173. Google the company was incorporated on 4 September 1998, which makes teas.co.uk 527 days older than Google itself.
What Google was in March 1997
When teas.co.uk went on the register, the search engine that now sends us so many of our visitors did not yet have its name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin's research project at Stanford University was called BackRub, and it ran on the university's own network. They settled on the name Google, a play on googol, the number one followed by a hundred zeros, later that year, and registered google.com in September. The company itself was set up a year after that, in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California.
The British internet in 1997
teas.co.uk comes from the early years of the .uk address system. Nominet, the not-for-profit company that runs .uk, was set up in 1996, and .co.uk was the address for British businesses. In 1997 a web address was still something most shops did not have and many people had never typed. teas.co.uk went on the register that spring, and the registry date shows it has stayed there ever since. The address turned 29 on 26 March this year.
An old address, a young shop
We keep two facts apart. The address dates from 1997; the shop does not. The company that runs it, Shop At www.teas.co.uk Ltd, was incorporated on 18 October 2025, and it took its first order at 13:24 on 18 November 2025. The company turns one next month, and the shop's first trading birthday is on 18 November.
The company carries the web address in its name on purpose. Every invoice, letter and register entry that prints "Shop At www.teas.co.uk Ltd" points straight back to the shop.
The timeline
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Nominet is set up to run .uk addresses; at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are building the BackRub search project |
| 26 March 1997 | teas.co.uk is registered |
| 15 September 1997 | google.com is registered, 173 days later |
| 4 September 1998 | Google is incorporated as a company |
| 18 October 2025 | Shop At www.teas.co.uk Ltd is incorporated |
| 18 November 2025 | The shop takes its first order, at 13:24 |
| 26 March 2026 | The address turns 29 |
| 18 October 2026 | The company turns one |
| 18 November 2026 | The shop's first trading birthday |
What an old name is worth
An address that has been on the register for 29 years is not a guarantee of anything. What it gives us is a name that has been part of the British internet for almost three decades and says exactly what we sell. You can remember it after hearing it once, spell it without help, and know what you will find before the page loads. We told the longer story of why the name matters to us in June.
What we do with it is up to us. The old address is the starting line, not the finish: the shop still has to earn every order and every return visit on its own merits.
Check it yourself
You do not have to take our word for any of this. Look up teas.co.uk on the Nominet lookup service and google.com on the ICANN lookup tool, and compare the dates. For teas.co.uk, look for the "Registered on" date; for google.com, the "Created" date. They say what we say.
Why we are telling you
Partly because it is a good fact, and we are allowed to enjoy it. Mostly because it is checkable. A shop that tells you something you can verify in thirty seconds is a shop you can trust with the things that are harder to check.
More from the news
- More than 690 new products: teas.co.uk passes 1,000
- Meet the founder: Lee Samuel Tucker joins our Tea people
- 5,000 visitors from Google in 28 days, and our best month yet with five days to go
- We are advertising to robots
Lee Samuel Tucker
Curator, teas.co.uk
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
