In 1996 Stanford University graduate student Larry Page (1973–) and Sergey Brin (1973–) began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub. BackRub operated on the Stanford servers for more than a year until it began to take up too much bandwidth. In 1997, Page and Brin decided they needed a new name for the search engine and decided upon Google as a play on the mathematical term “googol”. (A googol is the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.) Their goal was to organize the seemingly infinite amount of information on the Web. Google first incorporated as a company in September 1998 and the corporation went public in 2004.