A history of the Internet, part 3: The rise of the user

In August 1996, BackRub was made available as a link from Stanford’s website. A year later, Page and Brin rebranded the site as “Google.” The name was an accidental misspelling of googol, a term coined by a mathematician’s young son to describe a 1 with 100 zeros after it. Even back then, the pair was thinking big.