1998 –
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin founded the company
Google in
Menlo Park,
California,
US, to promote
the web search engine that they developed as a research project while attending
Stanford University.
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin when they were both
PhD students at
Stanford University in
California.
[24] While conventional
search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.
[25] They called this new technology
PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.
[26] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.
[27] Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked
backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
[28][29] Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "
googol",
[30][31] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle. Originally, Google ran under the
Stanford University website, with the domain
google.stanford.edu. The domain
google.com was registered on September 15, 1997,
[32] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, at a friend's garage in
Menlo Park,
California.
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