Google

How two professor sons got the world googling

Larry Page (Lansing, Michigan, March 26, 1973)
Sergey Brin (Moscow, August 21, 1973

The google search engine seems old, but it has only been operational since 1998. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who developed the search system, were 23 and 22 years old respectively when they bumped into each other at Stanford University in 1995.

Page had studied computer science in Michigan and came to Stanford over the weekend to see if it was interesting to do a PhD. Brin had arrived earlier from Maryland and was assigned to give newcomers a tour of the campus.

They both came from a highly educated family. According to the annals, things didn't immediately click between the two youngsters. But they were both looking for new ways to find data on the Internet.

Page's grandfather had worked all his life as a common laborer in the auto industry town of Flint. Father Carl Victor was the first in the family to have started a higher education.

In the 1960s, he was one of the first American students to earn a degree in computer engineering. He worked for NASA for a few years and then got a job as a professor of computer science in Michigan. That was the context in which Larry Page grew up.

At the age of 23 he had already built up a considerable reputation in the computer world, including with a programmable inkjet printer made with Lego blocks and a lot of electronics. Page is still proud of it today.

In interviews he likes to say that his love for the computer started when he was six years old.

Sergey Brin also has a special background. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973 to Jewish-Russian parents. Because the working conditions for Jewish scientists in the Soviet Union were not too good, the family emigrated to the United States six years later.

Sergey's father Michael has been working as a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland ever since. His mother Eugenia is employed by NASA. She specializes in measuring the speed and direction of winds that move close to the surface of the ocean.

Sergey was nine years old when his parents gave him a Commodore 64 as a gift. “I was very amazed at what such a computer could do,” says Brin today, “and I became interested in the way it all worked. I've been studying computers uninterrupted ever since.'

At Stanford they were taught by Rajeev Motwani, a young mathematician from India, who published a standard work on algorithms in 1995. Motwani would guide Brin and Page in their pursuit of the best data-finding algorithms on the Internet for years to come.

An algorithm is a system for performing arithmetic operations and their order. From January 1996, with the support of Motwani, the two brains worked on a search engine they called BackRub.

They developed some revolutionary search techniques, bought stacks of cheap floppy disks, and converted Larry Page's dorm room into a computer room. They were permanently in need of money and had to borrow computers to develop their plans.

Sergey called around the world to sell licenses of their search technology. Nobody was interested. For example, the founder of Yahoo said, "Come back when your homework is all done."

They urgently needed money to rent a larger room and then decided to start on their own. They both dropped their doctoral studies, wrote a business plan and started looking for investors.

The first man they visited was Andy Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun Microsystems. Just as they approached the front porch of his house, the man came running out on his way to a meeting.

Like lightning, they showed him a small demo of their project on the spot. "I don't have time," he said, "but I'll write you a check right away." When he sped away in his car, they were surprised to find that the amount of $100,000 was on the slip.

Formally they had not yet set up a company, so the check remained in a drawer for weeks. They accosted family, friends and acquaintances until they had raised a million dollars. And on September 7, 1998, Google Incorporated, located in Menlo Park California, was born.

They only had one employee when they were already receiving 10,000 search queries a day. Word of mouth worked wonders. By February 1999, they had eight employees and 500,000 inquiries a day.

That same year, an investment firm pumped 25 million dollars into Google and from then on Page and Brin shot off into the world like a comet with their small company. In 2000 their search engine counted one billion internet pages, in 2004 – the year Google went public – eight billion.

In 2006, they bought YouTube.

Google has long been much more than an ordinary search engine. It offers a whole list of free products such as Google Earth, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Books, and so on. Google today has more than ten thousand employees. 35 languages - from Turkish to Telugu - are spoken in the company.

Page and Brin attach great importance to what is called "Google culture."

This ranges from how the lobby, corridor and offices are arranged in Google buildings, to the right choice of computer equipment, recreational facilities (including roller hockey in the car park twice a week) to the Google café, where until the beginning of 2009 Charlie Ayers, the cook of the cult pop group The Grateful Dead, ruled the roost.

And when in June 2008 a deal between Google and its biggest competitor Yahoo was sealed with champagne, Sergey Brin thought food was part of the party: he promptly ordered from the local

Larry Page McDonald's Lego inkjet printer pulling a stack of hamburgers. According to market researchers, Google was the most valuable brand in the world in 2009, worth 86 billion
dollars.