Beginning in 1996, Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine called “BackRub” that used links to determine the importance of individual web pages. By 1998 they had formalized their work, creating the company you know today as Google.

Since then, Google has grown by leaps and bounds. From offering search in a single language we now offer dozens of products and services—including various forms of advertising and web applications for all kinds of tasks—in scores of languages. And starting from two computer science students in a university dorm room, we now have thousands of employees and offices around the world.

A lot has changed since the first Google search engine appeared. But some things haven’t changed: our dedication to our users and our belief in the possibilities of the Internet itself.

When you visit www.google.com or one of more than 180 other Google domains, you can find information in many different languages, check stock quotes and sports scores, find news headlines and look up the address of your local post office or grocery store. You can also find images, videos, maps, patents and much more. With universal search technology, you may see all of these items combined in one result page for your query, and services such as personalized search help you find even more information tailored to your interests. We’re also working to digitize some of the world’s information that until recently hasn’t been online, like books.

Search is how Google began, and it’s still at the heart of what we do today. We devote more engineering time to search than to any other product, because search can always get better and faster at helping you find what you want, when you want it, where you want it.

Read more: http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/