1995~
Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.
1996~ Larry and Sergey begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year, eventually taking up too much bandwidth.
1997~ Google.com is registered as a domain on September 15. The name, a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflects Larry and Sergey's mission to organise a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.