<P> Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California . </P> <P> While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites . They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site . </P> <P> Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site . Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information . Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu . </P> <P> The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998 . It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park, California . Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee . </P>

What is the origin of the name google