Once upon a time, in a magical land known as Stanford, there were two men. Their names were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These two Stanford geniuses took a look at the virtual world around them, and they decided that it just wasn’t good enough. Search engines relied entirely on keyword presence, showing sites that had manipulated their way into the results by creating bogus content or spamming their keywords. Page and Brin were sure there was another way.
They determined that they would find that other way, and create the (search engine) world that they envisioned. A world where sites were ranked based on how good they were and how much people liked them, not on their ability to contain a paragraph of spam keywords at the bottom. Encouraged by Terry Winograd to pursue the project, Brin and Page applied to the school for resources and school credit for the project. Luckily for Brin and Page, as well as for the rest of the world, their search engine research project was accepted by Stanford.
Their objective was to determine which sites were most popular on the web, and use this as the basis for their search results. They called their search algorithm BackRub, and it looked out across the web in an attempt to decide who the “cool kids” were. This was to be determined by looking at all the links on the internet. The theory was that if a site had more links to it, it meant that more people had gone out of their way to tell others about it. They then took it a step further, making it so that the links from sites that were more “popular” were valued more than links from less popular or newer sites.
While they decided on the name Google in 1997, registering the domain that year, they didn’t official incorporate until 1998, after they had indexed more than 60 million different web pages. Even when in the “beta” stage, technology magazines hailed their approach as the way of the future. Thus, Google, the giant of the technological world, was born.