Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998.
Page and Brin met as graduate students at Stanford University and began collaborating on a search-engine research project. Their system originally analyzed relationships between webpages, helping rank results by the importance of incoming links.
They first called the search engine BackRub. The name Google came from “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders’ ambition to organize a vast amount of information.
Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998. A common mix-up is confusing Google’s founding with the launch of its parent company, Alphabet: Alphabet was created in 2015 as a corporate restructuring, while Google itself dates to 1998.