Google created its search engine while founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford University students.
Page and Brin began collaborating on a search project at Stanford in the late 1990s. Their system was initially called BackRub because it analyzed the web’s backlinks. The approach helped rank pages partly by examining how other pages linked to them, an idea that distinguished it from many earlier search engines.
Google was incorporated in 1998, and its search service quickly gained users because it generally returned relevant results with a simple interface. Advertising, particularly the company’s text-based advertising systems, later became the main engine of Google’s financial growth.
Google is now a subsidiary within Alphabet, the holding company created in 2015. The search engine remains central to Alphabet, but the broader corporate group also includes advertising, cloud services, video, mobile software, and other technology businesses.