Which company launched the Google search engine in 1998?

Google launched the Google search engine in 1998. The company was founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose research project developed a new way to rank search results by analyzing relationships between web pages.

The search engine began as a Stanford project called BackRub, a name inspired by its analysis of backlinks. PageRank treated links from important pages as signals of authority, often producing more useful results than systems that simply counted how frequently a search term appeared. The Google.com domain had been registered in September 1997, and Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998.

Google was not the first search engine: services such as Lycos and Yahoo already existed, though Yahoo initially functioned primarily as a human-curated directory. Google’s distinctive ranking system, uncluttered interface, and rapid indexing helped it gain attention. The name “Google” was chosen as a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for 10¹⁰⁰, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize enormous amounts of information.