Early history

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003.Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[2] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"[3]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[2] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[2] Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point.[2] To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.[2] Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[2][4] A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.[5]

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:[6]

Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
...

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.

-Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu

Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol,"[7][8] which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."[9][10]

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.