Google started in 1996 as a research project of Larry Page and Sergey Brim while doing their Phd in Computer Science at Stanford University (California).
The web search engines at that time ranked a page according to how many times the search subject appeared on the page. Larry and Sergey's new method gave more importance to the relationship between webs.
They developed a new system named PageRank, a website ranking was determined by the number and relevance of pages, and the number of links to the original site.
The name Google was a misspell of Googol (this is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). The domain name was register in the 15 of September 1997.
To know more: www.google.com/about/corporate/company/history.html