Google

04/09/1998

The Google search engine was launched.

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both Ph.D students at Stanford University in California.

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a system that analyzed the relationships between websites. 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.

Google 1998

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.

Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998.