GOOGLE began as a project by Stanford University student Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996.
They devised a new way for a search engine to work by deciding how important an internet page was.
Their new company was famously started out of a garage in California in 1997 and named after a misspelling of googol, the number one followed by one hundred zeros.
Google is now the world’s most used search engine, deriving most of their profits from advertising.
They have begun to move into other markets including Google Maps, Google Mail, and a controversial plan to scan thousands of books and make them available online.
In the last quarter of 2009, their total revenue exceeded $6.7bn.
