Google's without a doubt the largest search engine in the world, but its beginnings were humble.
In 1996, as a research project, Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched a search engine that they nicknamed "BackRub", which was hosted by Stanford University.
The name "BackRub" was in reference to the search engine's method of checking a page's backlinks before ranking it in the search results.
In 1997, they changed the project's name to Google, a misspelling of "googol", the number one followed by a hundred zeros, and registered the domain Google.com soon after.