"Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] In search for a dissertation theme, Page decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[2] His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[2] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[2]"
Hacker project:
"Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] In search for a dissertation theme, Page decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[2] His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[2] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[2]"