In fact, many different companies have the opportunity to buy Google and turn its brand name into the most visited website in the world. As Interesting Engineering reports, Google began its life in 1995 as BackRub, a passion project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide backlinks to specific websites. Both wanted to be academics rather than businessmen. Even after Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim made an unconditional $100,000 donation to the Google project—a check that had to sit in a drawer for weeks because Brin and Page had yet to build a company called “Google”—programmers Still trying to sell rather than continue with their projects.
People keep rejecting them. George Bell, chief executive of early search engine Excite, called Brin and Page’s $1 million price tag “ridiculous.” David Cowan, an investment banker at Bessemer Investments, also rejected Brin and Page. But Yahoo is the biggest rejection.