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 their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of info on the Internet. Google was originally based in their friend Susan Woicicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California.

The two theorized that there was a better system to analyze relationships between websites rather than the conventional search engines that ranked results based on how many times the keywords appeared. This new technology that they crafted was called PageRank, which determined the relevancy of a website based on its number of pages that linked back to the original site, and the importance of those pages.

The theory worked, and Google has grown ever since into one of the most important companies in America today. Just in May of 2011, the monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed the one billion mark for the first. In January 2013, Google announced that it’d earned a whopping $50 billion in annual revenue for the previous year, which marked the first time the company had reached the feat.

Google had humble beginnings, but with their keen interest, and passionate ideas, they rose to success. If you have any comments or questions about Google’s interesting history, feel free to ask in the comments.