Before all the search engine optimizations strategies clawing at each other for the best of Google’s search engine rankings, Sergey Brin was assigned to show U Michigan grad Larry Page around Stanford in 1995.

The following year, the duo began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. This system checked sites’ backlinks to estimate the sites’ importance. BackRub operated on the Stanford servers for more than a year, until it simply took up too much bandwidth.

Then, in 1997, just two years after they met, Google.com is registered as a domain name. It’s a play on the word “googol,” which is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral one followed by 100 zeroes. “Google” is meant to reflect the Read More