Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 after developing a search engine at Stanford University.
The project began as BackRub, a research project that ranked web pages partly by analyzing their links. Page and Brin later renamed the company Google, a name inspired by “googol,” the mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100.
Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Its early workspace was a rented garage in Menlo Park, California, but the company soon outgrew its startup origins. The search engine’s relevance and speed helped it become a dominant gateway to the web.
A common mix-up is confusing Google’s founding date with its initial public offering. Google became a publicly traded company in 2004, six years after its founding. The company later expanded into advertising, mobile operating systems, video, cloud computing and hardware.