Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Larry Page
Larry Page was interested in technology because of his father, Carl Page (Michigan State Professor), gave him a computer at the age of 6. He later then went on to college to graduate with honors and bachelor's in Engineering and Concentration in Computer Engineering. Page then decided at the age of 24 to pursue a Ph.D in Computer Science at Stanford University. Which is later when he met Sergey Brin. Sergey was giving him a tour of the campus.
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin immigrated to the United States along with his family from the Soviet Union when he was 6 years old. Sergey received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science with honors from University of Maryland. Brins father also taught math there. At Stanford, Brin was studying to get a PhD in Computer Science & was studying ways to extract patterns and relationships from amounts of data.
The Start
After Page and Brin met, their friendship started to blossom in 1996. They would collect inexpensive computers and store them in their dorms. They then developed PageRank algorithm. Which proves that they will be better then other search engines. Later in that year, they tested the BackRub search engine on Stanford's servers.
" At Stanford we'd stand on the loading dock and try to snag computers as they came in." Page told Technology Review 2000 " We would see who got 20 computers and ask them if they could spare one."
Changing Google
Page and Brin eventually renamed the search engine Google. They got the idea from the play on words "Googol". Which is a mathematical term represented by the numeral one, followed by 100 zeros. This was relevant to their search engine because they wanted to created a search that organized a seemingly infinite amount of info of the internet. All though they ran the operation out of their dorms, but by the mid 1998, Google had 10,000 searches a day. Because of their growing website, they maxed out their credit cards at $15,000 to purchase a terabyte of disk space and drafted a business plan. August 2004, Google went public with an IPO that raised $1.67 billion. They also were the first and only company that allocated its stocks using computers rather than Wall Street bankers.
Them now
Page is worth $18.5 billion since the start of Google.
Sergey Brin is worth $31.8 billion since the start of Google.
Google today is one of the biggest search engines used.