Who are the co-founders of Google?

The co-founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The pair met as Stanford University graduate students and began developing a search engine project in 1996. They first called it BackRub, reflecting its focus on analyzing links between web pages. Their key innovation was PageRank, which treated links as signals of importance, somewhat like citations in academic research.

Page and Brin incorporated Google in 1998 after receiving early financial backing, including a $100,000 check from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The company was initially run from a garage in Menlo Park, California, before moving to a larger headquarters as usage grew.

Scott Hassan, who helped write important early code, is sometimes described as an unofficial third founder, but the standard and canonical answer to this question is Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Eric Schmidt later became Google's CEO, but he was not a co-founder.