Google was created in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a search-engine business.
Page and Brin met as graduate students at Stanford University and developed a search system originally called BackRub. The system ranked pages partly by analyzing links between them, an approach that helped Google produce highly useful results as the web expanded.
Google was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998. Its name is associated with “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, although the company’s spelling became Google. Advertising, especially search advertising, became the financial engine supporting the company’s rapid growth.
Google later expanded into email, maps, video, mobile software, browsers, and cloud computing. In 2015, Google became the principal subsidiary of Alphabet. That corporate change means Google and Alphabet are related but not interchangeable answers: Google is the operating company and brand, while Alphabet is the parent corporation.