Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California. The pair originally named their new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
Eventually, the name was changed to Google, a play on the word “googol“. A googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Read more…
