Google is incorporated
Two Stanford PhD students turn a link-counting algorithm into a company
Quick facts
- Founders
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin
- Incorporated
- August 1998
- Original name
- BackRub
- Key algorithm
- PageRank
What happened
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995 and began building a search engine, initially called BackRub, that ranked web pages by treating links to a page as votes for its importance rather than only matching keywords in the page's own text, an approach that became the PageRank algorithm. In August 1998, Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote them a $100,000 check on the spot after a demonstration, and Google Inc. was officially incorporated.
Why it matters
PageRank produced noticeably more relevant results than the keyword-matching search engines already on the market, and that quality gap is what let Google grow from a Stanford dorm-room project into the company that eventually became the web's default entry point and, later, the owner of one of the most valuable technology businesses in the world.
How we know
Google's own corporate history page, 'How we started and where we are today,' documents the Stanford meeting, the BackRub search engine, and the August 1998 incorporation directly.
Sources
- Google. How we started and where we are today · Primary source (author-declared)about.google · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Lemelson Foundation / MIT. Sergey Brin and Larry Page · Reputable sourcelemelson.mit.edu · The domain "lemelson.mit.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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