Google began in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University, to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. They developed PageRank, an algorithm that analyzes the backlinks to web pages to determine importance, forming the basis of Google's search results. Google was incorporated in 1998 and went public in 2004. It has since grown significantly and acquired many other companies to expand into other products and services while maintaining its mission of organizing the world's information.