Google was founded in 1996 as a research project by PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. They launched Google in 1998 with $100,000 in funding and grew it rapidly, creating language versions in 2000 and services like Google Images, Froogle, and Google Maps through the early 2000s. By acquiring YouTube in 2006, Google had become a global technology giant with over 50,000 employees and $50 billion in annual sales, maintaining the largest share of the search engine market.