Google is a monster, and it’s a voracious one at that. Originally conceived as a project by two Stanford PhD candidates, the Google search engine was first designed to crawl across websites, and identify links back to other websites. The theory was that finding common links back to websites would help identify which websites have the richest content. By the way, this is a fairly recent phenomenon-the original project was conceived in team 1996, and Google itself was incorporated in 1998.
More: continued here