India, Sept. 4 -- Google Inc. was formally born in September 1998, and went on to change how the world finds information online. But Google did not begin in a corporate office or as a grand business plan. Its origins can be traced to a Stanford University campus meeting in 1995, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin first crossed paths.

Today, Google Search is one of the most largely used gateways to the internet, and the company has expanded far beyond search into products ranging from Gmail and Maps to Android and YouTube.

The idea that set it all in motion was much narrower: could the links between webpages be used to figure out which pages were most important? To understand how Google came to be, it is worth going back to 1995 - when Page...