In 1996, two PhD candidates at Stanford University began to collaborate on a research project called Backrub, which delved into the mathematics of the World Wide Web. In the same way that citations are used to rank papers in academic publishing, BackRub kept track of the number of links to a particular website and used an algorithm to rank those links in order of importance.
The following year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin renamed their project Google. Fast-forward to today, and what started as a humble dissertation project has evolved into the world’s most valuable public company.
