Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg.

The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

[7] In the search of a dissertation theme, Larry Page had been considering among other things exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.

[10] The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco.

The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

[19] Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998.

[20] While setting up the Google engine, Page and Brin used the garage in their friend Susan Wojcicki's Menlo Park home for $1,700 a month.

[28] The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.

[29] In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.

[30] After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.

The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine Google News.

[42] On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference as π ≈ 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money.

In addition to an Internet Explorer replacement, Google designed its own Linux-based operating system called ChromeOS to directly compete with Microsoft Windows.

[citation needed] In April 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google ran a years-long program called 'Project Bernanke' that used data from past advertising bids to gain an advantage over competing ad services.

[84] In November 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) urged a federal court to impose significant changes on Google to address its monopoly in online search.

The proposed measures included forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser, sharing data and search results with competitors, and implementing various other restrictions.

The DoJ also sought to prohibit Google from re-entering the browser market for five years, selling its Android OS if needed, and halting investments in rival search engines or AI.

It also pushed to end exclusive deals where Google paid device makers like Apple to set its search engine as the default.

[86] The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a US$100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.

[94] Following the company's IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt requested that their base salary be cut to $1.

Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries were turned down, primarily because their main compensation continues to come from owning stock in Google.

[96] As a reply to this concern, co-founders Brin and Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture.

Page and Brin write in their first paper on PageRank:[20] "We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines."

[102] In April 1953 Clifford D Simaks short story "Retrograde Evolution" was published in Science Fiction Plus magazine wherein an alien race called "Googles" evolves from savages to geniuses overnight.

NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry.

[122][123] In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, allowing the Pope to have his own channel on YouTube.

[125] The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013; Google is part of the coalition of public and private organizations that also includes Facebook, Intel, and Microsoft.

[126] On September 21, 2017, HTC announced a "cooperation agreement" in which it would sell non-exclusive rights to certain intellectual property, as well as smartphone talent, to Google for $1.1 billion.

[132] On September 10, 2024, the EU Court of Justice, based in Europe, found that Google held an illegal monopoly, in this case with regards to its shopping search, and could not avoid paying €2.4 billion.

[84] The EU Court of Justice referred to Google's treatment of rival shopping searches as "discriminatory" and in violation of the Digital Markets Act.