On Wednesday, January 18, 2006, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion to compel in United States district court in San Jose seeking a court order that would compel search engine company Google Inc. to turn over, "a multi-stage random sample of one million URL’s", from Google’s database, and a computer file with, "the text of each search string entered onto Google’s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query)."[68] Google maintains that their policy has always been to assure its users privacy and anonymity, and challenged the subpoena. On March 18, 2006, a federal judge ruled that while Google must surrender 50,000 random URLs, the Department of Justice did not meet the necessary burden to force Google to disclose any search terms entered by its users
Wikipedia's history of google
"Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies"
