Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University where they studied for their PhD's in computer science. Page was 22 while Brin was 21 then.
In 1996, Page and Brin collaborated on a pioneering “web crawler” concept curiously called BackRub. Some speculate that the early search engine’s nomenclature was a nod to retrieving backlinks.
Page and Brin registered the domain name of their mushrooming project as Google, a twist on “googol,” a mathematical term represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeros.
The inaugural doodle was an out-of-the-office message that Page and Brin created in August of 1998 to let people know they’d shipped off to the Burning Man festival.
Starting in September 1998, Google first workspace was Susan Wojcicki’s garage on Santa Margarita Ave.
One of the early versions of Google could process 30-50 pages per second. Now Google can process millions of pages per second.
Google was first stored on ten 4GB hard drives in a Lego casing, now showcased by Stanford University. The Lego design would let the founders expand storage capacity easily.
Yahoo initially said no to Google founders to buy it, but in 2002 offered to buy Google for $3 billion. Google said no, and it’s now valued at $400 billion.
In 2006, the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries included the verb “Google” in their listings. now Google means search.
– Larry Page’s brother was a co-founder of eGroups, a dot-com company that Yahoo bought for about $500 million in 2000.