Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin after a search project at Stanford.
Page and Brin began developing a search engine called BackRub while they were graduate students at Stanford University. The project ranked webpages partly by analyzing links between them, an approach that helped distinguish it from many earlier search tools.
Google was incorporated in September 1998 and grew rapidly as web usage expanded. Advertising became its primary source of revenue, while products such as Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, and YouTube broadened its ecosystem.
Google is now the principal subsidiary of Alphabet. This distinction matters in market-cap questions: Alphabet is the listed parent company, whereas Google names the best-known operating businesses within that corporate group.