Google is the world's most popular search engine. It began as a search project in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were two Ph.D. students at Stanford University. They developed a search engine algorithm that ranked Web pages not just by content and keywords, but by how many other Web pages linked to each page. This strategy produced more useful results than other search engines, and led to a rapid increase in Google's Web search marketshare. The Google ranking algorithm was later named "PageRank" and was patented in September of 2001. In only a short time, Google became the number one search engine in the world.