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"Google" (often misspelled as "goggle," "gogle," "googel," "googl," and "googles") is the name of the most popular and ubiquitous search engine of the 21st Century. Google began in 1995 as a search engine called "BackRub," so named for its ability to determine how many links were pointing back to a particular Web site. A short time later, the name Google was derived from the mathematical term Googol, a number that is equivalent to the number one followed by 100 zeros. This name alludes to Google's intention to organize the immense and ever growing quantity of information that is available on the Internet.

The primary URL for Google is < http://www.google.com/ >, which is frequently entered as a search term in lieu of entering said URL into the address bar of a Web browser, along with "www.google.com," "google.com," "google. com," as well as URLs for the German version of Google, "www.google.de" and google.de." This is not unlike someone calling a telephone company operator to place a local phone call, leading many Internet researchers to conclude that there is a great deal of confusion among end users between the function of URLs and the function of search engines like Google.

Link popularity is the cornerstone of Google's enormously successful search algorithm, an algorithm that systematically ranks the relevance of the billions of Web sites that are indexed in Google's database. To wit, Google considers a Web site that is popular with other Web sites to be more of an authority than Web sites that stand alone. Google also analyzes the content of each Web site that it indexes in the context of the particular keywords that are used by end users in their search queries. This technology has proven so effective that it is now used by Yahoo!, AOL, and a wide variety of other Internet properties who have partnered with Google. In addition to providing high quality, general purpose search results, Google also offers a variety of customized search solutions as well as related services such as a Yahoo!-style Web directory, an Image search database, a USENET archive and forum where users can post and read articles, an up to the minute news database, and Google Answers, a forum where experts answer questions for a fee.