Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google as a company, transforming their Stanford research project—a search engine using the PageRank algorithm to rank web pages by link importance—into a business that would dominate global internet search. Operating initially from a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California, the company grew within a decade into one of the most valuable and influential corporations in history.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as PhD students at Stanford University, where they developed a search algorithm called PageRank that ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links pointing to them—a radical improvement over the keyword-stuffing search engines of the mid-1990s. They initially called their project 'BackRub' before settling on 'Google,' a play on 'googol,' the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting their ambition to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information.
With a $100,000 check from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, written before the company was even legally incorporated, Page and Brin set up shop in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, a Google employee who would later run YouTube.
Google's clean interface and superior results quickly won over users exhausted by cluttered portals like Yahoo and AltaVista. Within two years it was processing most of the world's web searches, and by the 2010s it had become a verb, an advertising empire, and a byword for the internet itself.