GOOGLE was incorporated as a privately-held company on September 4, 1998, by founders Larry PAGE and SERGEY Brin.The original name for the search engine they collaborated on was BackRub, but they changed it to Google in 1997. The name is a play on "googol," which is the mathematical term for the NUMBER 1 followed by 100 zeros.It represented the seemingly infinite amount of information they were trying to organize.