Google's history began in 1995 when Larry Page met Sergey Brin. At the time Larry Page was a Ph.D. student at Standford University, and Sergey was considering studying there. In 1996 Larry and Sergey began work on a search engine called BackRub.

The name comes from the algorithms ranking for how many "back-links" a page has. This engine worked on the Stanford servers for more than a year which eventually clogged up the bandwidth. Google.com was registered on September 15th, 1997.

Google, is a play on words of "googol" which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It is rumored that this reflects the founders' mission to organize the infinite amount of information on the internet.