Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, a Ph.D. student at Stanford working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies.

Google Inc. is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising(adsense,adword) related to its Internet search,e-mail(gmail), online mapping(google map),office productivity(google application), social networking(orkut) and video sharing(youtube) services as well as selling advertising-free versions of the same technologies. Google has also developed an open source web browser and a mobile operating system The Google headquarters, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009, the company has 19,786 full-time employees. The company is running thousands of servers worldwide, which process millions of search requests each day and about 1 petabyte of user-generated data every hour

Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15,1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4,1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of googol .