On this day in history: The world's largest search engine was founded

Google Inc. was founded in 1998, two years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin began developing its search engine. Their work sought an alternative to the search engines of the time, which ranked pages by how often a search term appeared on them.

Page and Brin developed a system that assessed a page’s importance by looking at how many other websites linked to it. They called the resulting technology PageRank.

The company’s early backers included Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Stanford computer science professor David Cheriton and entrepreneur Ram Shiram.

The September 7 historical list also notes events in Estonia and elsewhere, including the founding of a university in Colombia, Brazil’s declaration of independence, the start of Germany’s bombing of London in 1940, and the 1999 earthquake near Athens that killed at least 143 people. It records the 1996 shooting of actor and rapper Tupac Shakur, who died six days later, as well as the establishment of Google.