Google created its search engine after Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub at Stanford University.
Page and Brin began collaborating on a search project at Stanford in 1996. The project was first called BackRub because it analyzed backlinks, or links pointing to a webpage. Their ranking method, later known as PageRank, treated links as signals that could help identify important pages.
The company Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Its name is a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 10 followed by 100 zeros. The search engine initially operated from a garage in Menlo Park, California.
Google's corporate parent is Alphabet, created in a 2015 restructuring. Google remains the name of the search engine and a major operating division, so the two names should not be treated as interchangeable in every corporate context.