Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 and became known for its web search engine. The company was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998, in California.
Page and Brin began developing the project in 1996 while they were doctoral students at Stanford University. They first called the search engine BackRub because its ranking system analyzed backlinks. Their key innovation, PageRank, estimated a page’s importance partly by examining links from other important pages, improving on methods that mainly counted keyword appearances.
The name Google is a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize vast amounts of information. Google later expanded beyond search into advertising, email, maps, mobile software, cloud services, hardware, and artificial intelligence. Yahoo, AltaVista, and Bing are separate search brands, not earlier names for Google.