On this day in 1998, Google Inc. was formally established as founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page filed incorporation papers. Google began as a research project by Page and Brin in January 1996 while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Originally named “BackRub,” the project was aimed at devising a new method to determine the importance of individual webpages. The innovation at the core of BackRub was PageRank, an algorithm named after Larry Page, which assessed a website