Alphabet’s Google began as a research project at Stanford University in 1996.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the project while they were doctoral students at Stanford. Originally called BackRub, it used links between web pages as an important signal for ranking search results. The project was renamed Google, a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Google was incorporated as a company in September 1998, so 1996 is the year of the research project rather than the company’s incorporation. The Google search engine’s early success came from producing more useful results as the rapidly expanding web became harder to navigate.
In 2015, Google became the largest subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a new holding company created through a corporate restructuring. Alphabet’s publicly traded shares are therefore associated with the broader corporate group, while Google remains the best-known operating business. This distinction helps explain why sources may describe Google and Alphabet differently when discussing market capitalization.