On this day: September 15, 1997, the domain google.com was registered

On September 15, 1997, a domain registration for google.com appeared. Today it’s the address used by the whole world to search, but back then there was no corporation or offices behind it—just a research project by two students.

The project was called BackRub and started in 1996 at Stanford. It was led by Larry Page and Sergey Brin – at that time graduate students developing an algorithm for ranking pages by links, which later became the basis of the Google search engine.

The name Google was coined as a deliberate misspelling of the word googol—a unit with a hundred zeros. According to the founders themselves, it was a hint at the scale of the task: organizing huge amounts of information on the web.

Notably, the address preceded the legal entity: Google was officially registered only on September 4, 1998, in a garage in Menlo Park. So the domain, which became synonymous with search, appeared almost a year before the corporation itself.

Image: Google INC Public domain