Google, one of today’s most significant giant companies in information and communication technology, celebrated its 16th birthday on 4 September.

It all began as a research topic. In1996, two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then studying at Stanford University, came up with the theory that search technology based on the mathematical analysis of relationships between websites could produce better results than conventional search engines. The system was initially nicknamed BackRub because it estimated the relevance of a webpage from the number of backlinks to a site. A search engine called Rankdex was already using a similar strategy at the time.

As page and Brin were convinced that a site could only be determined as relevant in terms of efficient search if it could be reached from other sites of similarly importance, they decided to test their theory, and thus they lay the foundations for their search engine.

Originally the website of the Stanford University was used under the domain name google.stanford.edu. The google.com domain was registered on 15 September in 1997. Their company Google Inc. was registered on 4 September in 1998, and was based in a Californian friend’ apartment in Menlo Park. The name for the company and the search programme refers the number googol (=10E100).

The company’s initial capital was around 1,1 million US dollars, which included a cheque from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems.