Behind the People: Larry Page and Sergey Brin the Fathers of Google

Instead of going to the library to find information, now we choose to find information with just a few clicks and the touch of a keyboard key using Google as a search engine

The sentence above can describe how the process of finding information in today's era. Where Google began to shift books in physical form as an information center. Google is a search engine that can be used to find information on more than 1.9 billion websites in cyberspace and are used by more than 90% of the world's internet users. Google, which we know as the main search engine, started when Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in 1995 at Stanford University. 

Initially, they were college colleagues who both wanted to create a system that could produce relevant and desired information. The two first met in the summer of 1995 when Page was part of a group of prospective freshmen for whom Brin volunteered to tour the campus and nearby San Francisco. Page and Brin formerly worked on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP) which aims "to develop enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" that funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies. Brin and Page were also part of a team of computer science researchers at Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program administered for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) by major intelligence and military contractors. 

 As a Ph.D. a student at the time, Page was in a computer science graduate program and he was investigating the behavior of internet backlinks and the possibility of having an internet crawler that could determine which pages were linked from other pages. He saw this as a revolutionary approach to building such a search engine. Later, they both agreed to build a search engine together. Prior to that, the initial project involved an unofficial "third founder," Scott Hassan, the original lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company. Besides Scott Hassan, there was Alan Steremberg who also contributed at the beginning.

 With Brin's math skills, the two friends partnered to create the famous PageRank algorithm, which was named after Larry. The algorithm will rank the importance of a web page based on several link factors. With this technology, the most powerful search engine of the time was born and would be launched in Stanford's private local network in August 1996.

They spent every day working in Stanford University's dorm rooms. Their lack of rest paid off, which eventually gave birth to BackRub as a search engine in 1996 that use links to rank every page on the internet (which used to be called the World Wide Web) but they named this search engine Backrub.

 But the name Backrub did not last long until Brin and Page chose to use the name "Google" for their search engine. The word "Google" comes from "googol" which defines a mathematical expression for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which strongly reflects Larry and Sergey's mission of "managing the world's information and making it useful and accessible to everyone" also means to represents the goal of creating a large-scale search engine. The first version of Google was released in August 1996 on the Stanford website and the domain name www.google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.

 Back in the late 1990s, the goal was to get site visitors and keep them on your site. Since no one wanted to license the technology, Google continued to use google.stanford.edu. By the end of 1998, Google was serving more than 10,000 queries daily, and they knew they needed to provide their own resources instead of using Stanford's resources. Starting a company is the only viable alternative.

Google Becomes a Company

A faculty advisor suggested that Page and Brin meet with a Co-Founder Sun, Andy Bechtolsheim. And this is where Google merged into a Google Inc company with the help of Andy Bechtolsheim as an investor by giving them a check for $100,000. To celebrate the founding of Google Inc, they went to Burger King and had breakfast.

They kept checks in Page's dorm room for several weeks while they formed the company and set up bank accounts. And in the end, Google Inc was officially founded on September 7, 1998, with Page as CEO and Brin as President. With this investment too, the newly formed team began to scale up by moving from a dorm room to its first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California.

“Basically our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful” – Larry Page

 After the company started, Google went from Google's first server (which was made of Lego) to the first "Doodle" image in 1998: a figure of a puppet tucked into the Google logo for commemorating the Burning Man Festival.

 In the next few years, the company grew very fast. Already able to recruit engineers, form a sales team, and introduce his first company dog, Yoshka. Having grown so much bigger, Google eventually had to move from garage space to its current headquarters (“Googleplex”) in Mountain View, California (March 1999), where the home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. The search engine underwent many updates in an effort to eradicate abuse of search engine optimization, provide dynamic results updates, and make indexing systems fast and flexible.  

Now we know that Google is not only a massive search engine but also provides lots of features that specialize in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, cloud computing, software, and hardware. In 2002, the company then began to launch Google New, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011 (which closed in April 2019). In order to improve products and services, Google has worked with several corporations. 

And this is the Google that we know, starting from a dorm room at Stanford University to now becoming a massive company ruling cyberspace.

“The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.” - Sergey Brin