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 California.[26]
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 between websites.[27] They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[28][29]
A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[30] The technology in RankDex would be patented[31] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[32][33]
Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[34][35][36]
Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",[37][38] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.[39] Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu.[40]
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[41] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki[26]) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[26][42][43]
In May 2011, unique visitors of Google surpassed 1 billion mark for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from a year ago with 931 million unique visitors.[44]
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