Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, naming it after the 'googol' and initially calling its software 'Backrub'. What started as a college project revolutionized search. Google offers many free services like Gmail and YouTube to compete with other companies. It makes most of its revenue through ads on its search engine and other sites. While expanding into new areas like smartphones and cloud services has grown Google, it risks straying from its core principles of being helpful, harmless, and honest.