Google (formerly known as Backrub) (1996)
Their effort started off as a project hosted on Stanford servers called BackRub, so named since the system checked back-links to determine a site’s credibility. Within about a year, it quickly grew popular enough to warrant its own hosting and infrastructure outside of Stanford. An early project paper from 1997 is an interesting read and boldly predicted that "top search engines will handle hundreds of millions of queries per day by the year 2000." There aren't many screenshots of BackRub.
Early Stage Google (1997)
Google.com was registered on September 15th, 1997, and work began to port things over from BackRub to the new domain. Google the company did not yet exist, but the official domain name and very early branding allowed them to construct the first versions of Google as we know it today.
