8 years and still going!

[Burter]

Wikipedia

Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.[6] They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[7] It was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.[8] A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.[9]