Today in 1998, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin's little research project was incorporated. Google began as an alternative to more simplistic search engines. The goal was to have an algorithm that weighed the relevance of websites containing the search, not just looking for how many times a searched word or phrase appears on each site. Before its incorporation, Google was financially backed by Andy Bechtolsheim (founder of Sun Microsystems). It was further funded by three "angel investors:" Ram Shriram, David Cheriton, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.