What is Google

Originally known as BackRub, Google is a search engine that started development in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as a research project at Stanford University. Larry and Sergey decide the name of their search engine needs to change and decide upon Google, which is inspired from the term googol.

 The domain google.com was later registered on September 15, 1997, and the company incorporated on September 4, 1998. The picture below is a capture of the site from The Internet Archive of what Google looked like in 1998.

What helps Google stand out from its competition and helps it continue to grow and be the number one search engine is its PageRank technique that sorts search results. While being one of the best search engines on the Internet, Google also incorporates many of its other services, such as Google Maps and Google Local, to provide more relevant search results.