Google is recognized today as one of the largest technology companies in the world. It offers products and services in various domains including search engine, email, maps, browser, operating system, smartphone, smart speaker, virtual assistant, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, health, education, social media, e-commerce, and more. Google is known for producing innovative and creative solutions that facilitate, entertain, and enrich the lives of billions of people.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973, in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, was a computer science professor, and his mother, Gloria Page, was a computer programmer. Larry Page has had an interest in computers since childhood. He studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan and began his Ph.D. at Stanford University.
Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. His father, Michael Brin, was a mathematics professor, and his mother, Eugenia Brin, worked as a data analyst at NASA. Sergey Brin immigrated with his family to the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland and began his Ph.D. at Stanford University.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University and founded Google. Larry Page became the CEO of Google, while Sergey Brin became the president. In 2015, they established Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, with Larry Page as the CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin as the president. In 2019, they stepped down from their roles as CEO and president of Alphabet but continued to serve as co-founders of Alphabet.
Google’s Establishment
The story of Google begins at Stanford University in 1995. Larry Page is considering Stanford for his Ph.D., and Sergey Brin, a student there, is assigned to give him a tour of the campus. According to some sources, they initially disagreed on almost every topic during their first meetings but formed a partnership the following year. They develop a search engine that determines the importance of web pages based on their link structure, initially named “BackRub.”
BackRub stemmed from Larry Page’s Ph.D. thesis idea of examining the link structure of web pages as a large graph. His advisor, Terry Winograd, advises him to pursue this idea (which Larry Page later recalls as “the best advice I ever got”), and Larry Page focuses on the problem of finding other web pages linking to a given web page. This problem is addressed with the notion that the number and quality of links to a web page provide valuable information about that page’s importance, akin to citations in academic publishing. Larry Page explains his ideas to Scott Hassan, who begins coding to implement Page’s ideas.
Scott Hassan is considered an unofficial “third founder” who wrote much of the original code for the Google Search engine, but he departs from the project before Google is formally incorporated. Hassan later decides to pursue a career in robotics and founds a company called Willow Garage in 2006. Craig Nevill-Manning is invited to join the founding of Google but declines; he later joins the company.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin utilize Stanford University’s network to improve the performance of BackRub. However, they realize that BackRub consumes too much bandwidth and are forced to halt the project. Meanwhile, they obtain a patent for the algorithm used by BackRub to determine the importance of web pages, named PageRank.
PageRank calculates the importance of a web page based on the number and importance of other web pages linking to it. Therefore, the more and higher-quality links a web page receives, the more important it is considered. PageRank is one of the first and most effective algorithms used to rank web pages.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin recognize the potential of BackRub and decide to commercialize the project. In 1997, they rebrand BackRub as Google. Google is a misspelling of “googol,” the name of the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This name reflects Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in a garage at Stanford University, it might have been difficult to predict that this project would be a great success. However, Google quickly became one of the most important players in the internet world. Initially, Google provided only a search engine service, but over time, it expanded its range of services and launched many products such as Gmail, Google Ads, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Drive.
Since its inception, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have taken various steps to sustain and expand the company’s success. In 2004, Google went public, and the company’s value began to rapidly increase. During this time, Page and Brin served as CEO and President of Google, guiding the company’s strategic decisions.
However, in 2015, when they established Alphabet Inc. as Google’s parent company, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began to focus on managing Alphabet rather than the daily operations of Google. Since then, Sundar Pichai has served as the CEO of Google.
Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are still major shareholders of Google as its co-founders. However, they are not actively involved in the day-to-day operations. Instead, they invest in new ventures in the technology field and continue to shape Google’s long-term strategic vision.
The success of Larry Page and Sergey Brin symbolizes the emergence of a company that has created much more than just a search engine. Google has become an integral part of the daily lives of billions of people worldwide, a result of Page and Brin’s vision and determination.
Therefore, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, will be remembered not only as the founders of a search engine company but also as visionary leaders who played a significant role in the evolution of modern technology and the internet.
Author: Hakan Karaman
