On this day, two American computer scientists, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded the multinational corporation and technology company Google LLC (Limited Liability Company). Page and Brin were PhD students at Stanford University in California working on a new kind of search engine that would determine a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site, rather than by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page. Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine ‘BackRub’, but eventually they changed the name to Google, a misspelling of the word googol (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros), picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Today, Google Search and Google’s music and video streaming service, YouTube, are the two most-visited websites worldwide.
