Larry Page and Sergey Brin
The Men Who Organized the Web
Google is the world's most popular search engine with over 3.5 billion searches each day. It has changed the way society recieves information. Google started as a class research project for inventors Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. Read on to see how these two university students turned a class project into a household name.
Sergey Brin (director of special projects)
Sergey Brin was born August 21, 1973 in Moscow Russia. He was the son of a Soviet Mathematician economist. After Immigrating into the United States, Sergey recieved a degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland. After finishing his degree from the University of Maryland, Brin went onto Stanford university to pursue a doctorate in computer science where he met Larry Page.
Larry Page (CEO)
Larry Page was born March 26, 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. His father was very influentialin the field of computer science and artificial intelligence and Page's mother taught computer programming. Page received a degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, but he later decided to pursue a doctoral program in computer science from Stanford University where he met Sergey Brin.
The Idea
Both Brin and Page had the desire to organize the web in order to make searching the internet easier. Sergey and Larry both have strong backgrounds in computer science and mathematics giving them the skills needed to make their one "big idea" a reality.
While at Stanford, Page and Brin created a search engine as a research project. Their search engine used the number back links to rank a website's popularity, thus creating better results and less time spent searching. They created a homepage that had no ads which made the page load faster and resulted in less time spent searching. They named their website "Google" as a play on the word "Googol" which is a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google was revolutionary because many search engines in the mid 1990's were near impossible to use due to worthless results and cluttered homepages. Page and Brin incorporated Google on September 4, 1998. Google went public on August 19, 2004, making Brin and Page billionaires. in 2006, Google acquired YouTube, the world's most popular website for streaming user-submited videos, for $1.65 billion in stock. in 2012, Google has made over $51 billion and continues growing each year. Since Google started in 1998, it has become the most popular search engine in the world with over 3.5 billion searches a day.
Extend Your Knowledge
1. Do you admire what Sergey Brin and Larry Page did?
- I admire what they were able to accomplish. They created the most popular way to obtain information on the internet and were able to accomplish their goals.
2. Do you have similar backgrounds or interests?
- I enjoy working with computers, but not on the scale required to create a website like Google.
3. What could you invent and how would it help improve other people's lives?
- I could invent a special glass for car windows that significantly reduces glares from headlights of oncoming traffic without making the glass darker or more difficult to see through. This would create a safer way to drive at night by giving drivers higher visibility of the road ahead.