What is the success story of Google?

The story of Google begins in 1995 when Larry Page was considering Stanford University for graduate school and met Sergey Brin, a student there. Page and Brin didn’t always agree, but by 1996, they partnered to start a research project called “BackRub” while they were both PhD students at Stanford. The project involved exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web and how to understand its link structure as a graph. Page and Brin theorized that a better search engine system would analyze the relationships between websites instead of simply counting how many times search terms appeared on a page. They named their algorithm after Page and based search results on linking behavior. Their research paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, became popular in Silicon Valley and helped lead to the launch of the Google search engine on Stanford’s private network in August 1996. The search engine was officially launched to the public on September 4, 1998. 

You can read more about Google’s history in The Google Story by David A. Vise. Some say the book is fascinating and provides a great background on the company.