Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on 4 September 1998.
Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy