Googling Google

Technology

In 1996, Google began as a research project at Stanford University. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project which had the goal of developing enabling technologies for an integrated and universal digital library. Funding for the project received funding from federal agencies.
Page strove to find out which web pages link to which pages. He found the backlinks to provide valuable information about a page. In March 1996, Page’s project, nicknamed “backrub,” was put on the web. Its initial starting point was Page’s own Stanford home page. On September 15, 1997, the domain google.com was registered and the company, Google Inc. was formally incorporated.
The name was originally supposed to be googol, referring to 1 followed by one hundred zeros, but a misspelling left it as Google. The verb, to google, was added to dictionaries in 2006.