Google is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. that is the most used search engine on the web. It was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as a research project at Stanford University. Google indexes web pages using its web crawler and ranks them based on PageRank, which determines importance based on the number and quality of links to a page. When a user searches Google, it examines its index and returns relevant results based on the user's search terms.