The history of Google

The Google founders

Everything B.G. (Before Google) was very important for the evolution of search engines, and many of the search engines launched between 1993 and 1997 was very good already at that time.

However, all these early search engines was actually doing was shuffling tons of snow for what was coming from two masterminds behind them.

The history of the two Google founders is somewhat mystified as they have rather ironically managed to anonymize much around their life, while at the same time running the world's largest corporation with the ultimate goal to structure and present all the world's information.

Larry Page

Larry Page, or Lawrence Edward Page which is his actual name, is one of the two founders of Google.

Born in Michigan back in 1973, Page grew up in a perfect environment to become a technological mastermind. His father earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan when the field was established, and has later been described as a «pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence». Page’s father later became a computer science professor at Michigan State University, while his mother became an instructor in computer programming at both Lyman Briggs College and Michigan State University.

During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house «was usually a mess, with computers, science, and tech- and science magazines all over the place», which he spent huge amount of time pouring over.

Page also played flute and studied music composition while growing up, and as mentioned numerous times that his musical education inspired his impatience and obsession with speed in computing. Page has said that «In music, you’re very cognizant of time. Time is like the primary thing». It will not be an understatement to say that Page’s early involvement with music is an important factor for Google’s extreme focus on speed.

Page later studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan, with honors and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University.

After enrolling in a computer science PhD program at Stanford, Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding the link structure of it.

Page’s supervisor, Terry Winograd, a professor of computer science at Stanford, encouraged him to pursue the idea, which Page has recalled to be the best advice he had ever received.

Page focused on the problem of finding which web pages linked to a given page, considering factors like backlinks as valuable information for that page.

Sergey Brin

Another Stanford PhD student, Sergey Brin, would soon join Page’s research project, nicknamed BackRub.

Sergey Brin, born in 1973, the same year as Larry Page, had a somewhat similar adolescence as Page, except that Brin was born in Moscow in the then Soviet Union.

Brin’s parents were both graduates of Moscow State University.

The Brin family managed to leave the Soviet Union in early 1979, and lived in Vienna and Paris for a short while, until they managed to receive a visum to be allowed to move to the United States in late 1979.

Today Brin’s father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Brin’s own mathematical skills was very high, and he even interned at Wolfram Research, the developers of Mathematica, at the age of 20, at the same time he was graduating in computer science at Stanford University.

During an orientation for new students at Stanford, Brin met Larry Page, as Brin had volunteered to show Page and other potential new students around the campus.

They immediate disagreed on most subjects, but after spending more time together they became «intellectual soul-mates and close friends».

Brin’s focus was on developing data mining systems while Page’s was in extending «the concept of interfering the importance of a research paper from its citrons in other papers».

Together, they authored a paper titled «The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Web Search Engine».

The huge difference that changed everything

Back in 1996, all search engines ranked their results based upon the frequency of the content on a site being queried. If the words «car rental» was mentioned enough times, it got a high ranking. Simple as that.

BackRub, the research project Page was already working on, and which was soon joined by Brin, had a revolutionary new approach to the ranking; they considered the backlinks - the links pointing to a specific site - to be the most relevant factor for the ranking.

The basic idea was, «If people are talking about you, you must be important», as in «if other websites mention you / link to you, you must be important».

Soon after, Page and Brin developed the PageRank algorithm, soon realizing that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to all existing ones.

As Google’s own statement of PageRank is:

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

We will get into all the relevant details of the PageRank algorithm in chapter 2, when we look at the various ranking factors, of which PageRank to this day is one of the most important ones.

Google is born

Originally the Backrub search engine by Page and Brin used Stanford’s website with the domain google.stanford.edu, as Page realized he couldn’t name his company Backrub («lets backrub it» vs «lets google it»).

The name Google comes from the mathematical term «googol», which is an insanely large number, «10 raised to the power of 100». Scientists assume there are around 10 raised to the power of 80 number of atoms in the whole universe, making a googol a pretty serious number.

When Larry Page tried to come up with a name of his company, he asked his friend Sean Anderson to check if the name googol.com was available. Sean misspelled it as google.com, which Page eventually liked better, and so Google Corp was born.

On September 15th 1997 they registered the domain google.com, and on September 4th 1998 the company Google was formally incorporated, in - of course - a garage in Silicon Valley. More exactly, in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, which later became an executive at Google, and is today the CEO at YouTube.

Google was privately held until August 19th 2004, when it became publicly listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange with a share price of $85, which in 2019 is traded at over $1200, an 1300% increase from its initial offering.

In August 2015, Google announced its plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc, with Google being its leading subsidiary.

During this reorganization process, Sundar Pichai, an Indian-American working at Google since 2004, and leading the development of many of Google’s most important offerings from Chrome to Drive to Gmail, Maps and Android, he was appointed the CEO of Google.

Today, Alphabet, with its subsidiary Google, is an American multinational technology company with around 100.000 employees all around the world, headquartered in Mountain View, California.