Google began as a research project 'BackRub'
Google Co-founder Sergey Brin, who turned 43 on Sunday, met Larry Page at Stanford University in 1995 and the duo worked together on a research project titled 'BackRub', calling it a "web crawler" designed to roam the web. BackRub operated on Stanford's servers for a year before shutting down for taking too much bandwidth. The Google.com domain was registered in 1997.