Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. They started the project in 1996 under the name "BackRub," which was later renamed Google. The key innovation was their PageRank algorithm, which ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links to them, improving search relevance compared to earlier engines
. An unofficial "third founder," Scott Hassan, was the original lead programmer who wrote much of the initial code but left before Google was officially incorporated. Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially founded Google Inc. on September 4, 1998, in a garage in Menlo Park, California, with early funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
. Thus, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are credited as the creators of Google, with significant contributions from Scott Hassan in the early development phase
