Larry Page and Sergey Brin established Google in 1998.
Page and Brin met as Stanford University graduate students and began developing a search engine called BackRub. The project ranked web pages partly by analyzing links between them, an approach that helped distinguish it from many earlier search tools.
Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998. The company later became the core of Alphabet, which was created as a holding company in 2015. Alphabet's businesses include Google Search, YouTube, Android, and Google Cloud, helping make it one of the world's most valuable listed companies.
Google's founding year is sometimes confused with the date of its first search prototype. BackRub was operating before the company was incorporated, while the Google name and corporate organization belong to the late 1990s.