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Brin and Page were also part of a computer science research team at Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) by large intelligence and military contractors. The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies. Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The two had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to give a tour around the campus and nearby San Francisco. The research project was nicknamed "BackRub", and it was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
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Page told his ideas to Hassan, who began writing the code to implement Page's ideas. His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got" ) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In the search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering among other things exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006. Google has its origins in "BackRub", a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The first Google computer at Stanford was housed in custom-made enclosures constructed from LEGO bricks. The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. The company set up a charitable offshoot,, in 2005. Google has engaged in partnerships with NASA, AOL, Sun Microsystems, News Corporation, Sky UK, and others. The search engine went through many updates in attempts to eradicate search engine optimization
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In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011 (which was shut down in April 2019), in addition to many other products. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm at first known as " BackRub" in 1996, with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine.
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