hypothesized

They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques, which essentially ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. Their search engine was originally nicknamed, "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.^[8]Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.A small search engine called

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.