Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998 while they were Stanford students.
The project began as a Stanford research effort called BackRub, which ranked web pages partly by analyzing links between them. Page and Brin later renamed the company Google, a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998, and its first office was a rented garage in Menlo Park, California. The company’s early search technology became popular because it often returned more relevant results than competing search engines.
A common mix-up is confusing Google with Alphabet. Alphabet became Google’s parent company in 2015, when Google reorganized and placed several businesses under the new holding company. Google remains the name of the search and technology company most people use.