Google. What in the world does that word mean? Google is a play on the word googol, while means the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. It has a symbolic ring to it, representing the mission of organizing every single piece of information on the web one day - hence, making it close to infinite, so to speak. It was started by two Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1995.

In 1996, they decided to work on huge databases and create methods of retrieving information in it. Page and Brin started out with a search engine called BackRub, which turned out to be a huge success among people on campus. They continued to work on their technology for three years, purchasing computers to serve as databases along the way and setting them up in Larry's dorm room. In addition, they spent a fortune buying terabytes of memory. Push comes to shove, they wrote up a business plan, cancelled their education for a while, and sought out an investor. With hard work, they managed to come up with $1 million in investment cash.

In 1998, the first Google offer was born - in a friend's garage. Still in the beta version, they were receiving about 10,000 search queries daily. Soon enough, the duo and the search engine started to generate interest from national newspapers. In 1999, Google was taking on 500,000 queries a day. In addition, Google was no longer beta and it continued to expand. Page and Brin started to develop partnerships with plenty of major Internet companies including Yahoo. Google also came up with the revolutionary idea of a toolbar where you could type in a word to search the web without visiting a search engine page.

And as they say, the rest is history. Google has now created their own email service (considered better than Yahoo and Hotmail), plenty of new innovations (they plan to open an office on the moon), and have promised free storage space for everyone on the Internet within a couple of years. Without a shadow of a doubt, it is safe to say that Google is the best search engine the world has ever seen.