Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two met at Stanford University and began developing the search project that became Google while they were both doctoral students there.
Their work started in 1996 as a research project focused on the structure of the World Wide Web. Page was interested in analyzing links between pages, while Brin joined the effort and helped develop the mathematical and technical foundations of the system. The project initially carried the nickname BackRub because it examined backlinks.
Google's key innovation was PageRank, an algorithm that estimated the importance of a web page partly by considering which other pages linked to it. This differed from systems that relied mainly on counting words on a page, helping Google return more relevant results as the web grew.
The founders formally incorporated Google in 1998. Scott Hassan wrote much of the original search-engine code and is often described as an important early contributor, but the canonical answer to who founded Google remains Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Eric Schmidt joined later as an executive and was not a co-founder.