Google in 1998 (notice the exclamation mark)

Sure, everybody knows that Google was created by Stanford Ph.D. students
Larry Page and Sergey Brin who became gazillionaires. But did you know
that Google's first storage device was cobbled together with LEGO? Or
that Google's first investor wrote a $100,000 check even before the company
officially existed? Or that it has its own "official" Google
dog?

Neatorama presents the Top 10 Neat Facts About Google:

In
1996, graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on a research
project to understand the link structure of the World Wide Web. They're
particularly interested in determining the importance of a given web page
based on its backlinks or how many other web pages link to it (which later
became the concept behind Google's "PageRank" algorithm).

The project was named BackRub (yes, a play on the word "backlink").
You can see an archived