Google began in 1996 as a project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry and Sergey were both studying at Stanford University California. In their research project they came up with a plan to make a search engine that ranked websites according to the number of other websites that linked to that site (and ultimately came up with the Google we have today). Before Google, search engines had ranked sites simply by the number of times the search term searched for appeared on the webpage, and the duo set out to make a more “aware” search engine.
The domain google.com was registered on September 14th 1997 and Google Corporation was formed a year later in September 1998.
Google started selling advertisements with its keyword searches in 2000, and so Google Adwords/Adsense was born. These advertisements used a system based on the pretence that you only paid for your advertising if some clicked on your ad link – hence the term Pay Per Click (PPC) was born.
The term PageRank was patented in September 2001 – this term is actually named after co-founder Larry Page and not, as some think, named because it is the rank of a page (webpage).
Also in 2001 co-founder Larry Page stood down as the CEO of Google and former CEO of Novel. Eric Schmidt. was appointed as the new CEO of Google.
Google moved its offices to its large Google estate (nicknamed GooglePlex) in Mountainview California in 2003, and is still based there today.