These two Stanford University students devised the concept of Google in the late 1990's , and coded it in their dormitory room.  Using "Googol" as its original name  (a math term which means 1 followed by 100 zeros... a very big number), Sergey and Lawrence coded this database to "spider" and auto-search the web for updates. They decided to formally fund this web search project, and hired a staff of six to help them in 1999.

As of July 2004, Google has a staff of over 2000 employees, is  published in 97 different languages in 85 different countries, and has a database size of over 6 billion web pages, images, and news articles. It is the single most popular search device on the Internet.