Life without Google: unimaginable.
Thank goodness then for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, pioneers in computer science and co-founders of the world’s leading search engine.
Back in the dark age of 1995, Page and Brin met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science and reputedly took a dislike to each other. Fortunately these two brilliant minds thrashed it out until they found common ground in an unprecedented approach to a huge computing conundrum: how to retrieve specific information from an enormous set of data.
By 1996 Page and Brin were collaborators in their first search engine called ‘BackRub’ (so-called for it’s ability to read the ‘back links’ to a given website) and Page, who had won fame at college for creating a working printer out of Lego, formulated a new server environment which used the common PC rather than more expensive machines. Initially working from Larry’s dorm, the pair’s reputation grew and as they gathered funding they decided to set up their own search engine company, Google.com, from a friend’s garage in 1998.
Their patented ‘PageRank’ system, which was an evolution of their earlier BackRub system, underpins the workings of the Google search engine. This system determines the ranking of a web page using an algorithm that takes into account both the number of web links to that page, and the relative importance of the pages on which these links appear.
Offering a solution to the ‘needle in a haystack’ problem posed by the internet, Google inevitably took off, and venture capital firms scrambled to get on board. By 1999 the company had expanded to its present headquarters in California, called ‘The Googleplex’.
By 2000, Google had merged with rival Yahoo! and was handling 100 million searches a day from a buzzing office, scattered with lava lamps, dogs and tables made from old doors. This hotbed of ideas spawned numerous developments including Google News, Blogger and Google AdSense.
Page and Brin, currently sharing the presidency of the company, received the Marconi Prize in 2004 and continue to share their wisdom at academic, business and technology forums the world over. Student projects don’t get much better than this!
