September 4th 1998 - Google is founded.
On this day in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded what would become the most widely used web-based search engine in the world, Google Inc., in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.
Computer science grad students at Stanford University, Page and Brin had been working since March 1996 on a research project called the Stanford Digital Library Project. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the project’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library.”
Their initial project led to the creation of BackRub, an early search engine Page and Brin developed using backlink data, or information on incoming links. The two assumed that the pages with the most links to them from other relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with a given search. That concept, soon trademarked as PageRank, an algorithm that analyzes links, became the foundation for how Google works.