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 California.
Google, originated from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wanted to provide large quantities of information for people.
Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.
The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.
In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed 1 billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million)
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