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 to find files on the Internet. Larry and Sergey later decided the name of their search engine needed to change and decide upon Google, which is inspired from the term googol.

Google beginnings

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.