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 Stanford, California.
Google's original homepage had a simple design because the company founders had little experience in HTML, the markup language used for designing web pages.
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 among websites.They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked back links to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcick) in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.