Long before it became the world’s most powerful tech company, Google began as a humble research project called Backrub. In 1998, two brilliant PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created Backrub to explore how websites could be ranked based on their backlinks.
Unlike existing search engines at the time, Backrub analyzed the relationship between websites using a system that would later evolve into PageRank. This method helped deliver more relevant search results by evaluating the number and quality of links pointing to a page. It was a breakthrough in internet search technology.
Backrub operated on Stanford’s servers but quickly grew too large, prompting the duo to seek a better solution. That led to the birth of Google, a name inspired by “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflected their mission to organize the seemingly infinite amount of information on the internet.
By late 1998, Google had officially launched from a garage in Menlo Park, California, and within a few short years, it revolutionized the way people found information online. What started as a university side project turned into a global tech giant, now offering services in search, advertising, cloud computing, AI, and more.
Today, Google is a key part of daily life for billions of people worldwide. Its origin story is a powerful reminder of how innovation, curiosity, and problem solving can shape the future.
Source : capital-commerce.com
