Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.
Page and Brin met at Stanford University and began collaborating on a search-engine project in 1996. Their early system was called BackRub because it analyzed the web’s backlink structure. That approach helped Google rank pages by the importance of links pointing to them, rather than relying only on the frequency of search terms.
The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, after Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote the young founders a $100,000 check. Google’s name was inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize a vast amount of information.
People sometimes confuse Google’s incorporation date with its search engine’s earlier development. The prototype existed before the company was formally established. Google later moved from Stanford-related experiments into a Menlo Park garage, held its initial public offering in 2004, and became part of Alphabet after a 2015 corporate restructuring.