Google began in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. They built a search engine called Google with a mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. Google has since grown tremendously, processing over 20,000 terabytes of data daily with over 450,000 servers located around the world. It offers a wide range of popular products and services beyond its core search engine.