Founders - Larry Page, Sergey Brin

First location - Menlo Park, CA

Google has its origins in "BackRub", a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The project initially also involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but left before Google was officially founded as a company.

Page's 'web crawler' began exploring the web in March 1996, with Page's own Stanford home page serving as the only starting point.

The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website. It used nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth.