Google created the world’s most widely used search engine, Google Search.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search engine while they were graduate students at Stanford University. Their 1998 paper described PageRank, an approach that assessed the importance of web pages partly through links from other pages. Google’s relevance and speed helped it grow rapidly during the early expansion of the web.
The company was incorporated in September 1998 after operating from a garage in Menlo Park, California. Its name is a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 10 raised to the 100th power. Google’s main business became online advertising, particularly ads connected to search queries.
Google is now a subsidiary of Alphabet, the holding company formed in 2015. The company also develops Android, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, and Google Cloud. Google Search is sometimes confused with Alphabet because Alphabet is the listed parent corporation, while Google is the operating company and brand most users recognize.