This article covers the history of Google, the most widely used web-based search engine in the world.

Early history[link]

Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003

Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford^[1] working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library." and was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies.^[2][3][4][5] In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.^[6] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got"^[7]) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).^[6] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.^[2] Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.^[6] Page's web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page's own Stanford home page as its only starting point.^[6] To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.^[6] Analyzing BackRub's output—which, for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance—it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).^[6][8]

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services (a subsidiary of Dow Jones) designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.^[9] The technology in RankDex would be patented ^[10] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.^[11][12]

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. By early 1997, the backrub page described the state as follows:^[13]

Some Rough Statistics (from August 29th, 1996)
Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million
Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes
...

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.

-Larry Page page@cs.stanford.edu

Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.^[14]

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages.^[15] The home page was still marked "BETA", but an article in Salon.com already argued that Google's search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com, Go.com and MSN.com) which at that time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as "the future of the Web", especially by stock market investors.^[15]

In March 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.^[16] After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company leased a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003.^[17] The company has remained at this location ever since, and the complex has since become known as the Googleplex (a play on the word googolplex, a number that is equal to 1 followed by a googol of zeros). In 2006, Google bought the property from SGI for $319 million.^[18]

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.^[19] In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.^[1] The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.^[1] Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click.^[1] This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture Services, before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Marketing).^[20][21][22] While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.^[1]

Google's declared code of conduct is "Don't be evil", a phrase which they went so far as to include in their prospectus (aka "S-1") for their 2004 IPO, noting, "We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."^[23]

Financing and initial public offering[link]

The first funding for Google as a company was secured on August 1998 in the form of a $100,000USD contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.^[24]

On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced;^[25] the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.^[24]

While Google still needed a lot of funding for their further expansion, Brin and Page were hesitant to take the company public even though that would basically solve most of their financial issues. They were not ready to give up their control over Google. After borrowing the $25 million venture capital money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, Sequoia forced Brin and Page to hire a CEO or else they would take back that borrowed $12.5 million. Finally, Brin and Page gave in and hired Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO in March 2001 and the company went public three years later.^[26]

In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of shares (IPO), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger.^[27] However, no such deal ever materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.

On April 29, 2004, Google made an S-1 form SEC filing for an IPO to raise as much as $2,718,281,828. This alludes to Google's corporate culture with a touch of mathematical humor as e ≈ 2.718281828. April 29 was also the 120th day of 2004, and according to section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, "a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120 days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10 million in assets and/or 500 shareholders, including people with stock options."^[28] Google has stated in its annual filing for 2004 that every one of its 3,021 employees, "except temporary employees and contractors, are also equity holders, with significant collective employee ownership", so Google would have needed to make its financial information public by filing them with the SEC regardless of whether or not they intended to make a public offering. As Google stated in the filing, their, "growth has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private companies must report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed by this requirement accelerated our decision." The SEC filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003.

In May 2004, Google officially cut Goldman Sachs from the IPO, leaving Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston as the joint underwriters. They chose the unconventional way of allocating the initial offering through an auction (specifically, a "Dutch auction"), so that "anyone" would be able to participate in the offering. The smallest required account balances at most authorized online brokers that are allowed to participate in an IPO, however, are around $100,000. In the run-up to the IPO the company was forced to slash the price and size of the offering, but the process did not run into any technical difficulties or result in any significant legal challenges. The initial offering of shares was sold for $85 a piece. The public valued it at $100.34 at the close of the first day of trading, which saw 22,351,900 shares change hands.

Google's initial public offering took place on August 25, 2004. A total of 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share.^[29] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US$1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.^[30] The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.^[31]

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.

Growth[link]

The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hardware and was designed to be very fault-tolerant

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading web log hosting website. Some analysts considered the acquisition inconsistent with Google's business model. However, the acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information gleaned from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine Google News.

At its peak in early 2004, Google handled upwards of 84.7% of all search requests on the World Wide Web through its website and through its partnerships with other Internet clients like Yahoo!, AOL, and CNN. In February 2004, Yahoo! dropped its partnership with Google, providing an independent search engine of its own. This cost Google some market share, yet Yahoo!'s move highlighted Google's own distinctiveness, and today the verb "to google" has entered a number of languages (first as a slang verb and now as a standard word), meaning, "to perform a web search" (a possible indication of "Google" becoming a genericized trademark).

the relationship between Google, Baidu, and Yahoo

After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock price more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004 the number of shares outstanding was 172.85 million while the "free float" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by insiders). In January 2005 the number of shares outstanding was up 100 million to 273.42 million, 53% of that was held by insiders, which made the float 127.70 million (up 110 million shares from the first trading day). The two founders are said to hold almost 30% of the outstanding shares. The actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google has a dual class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page says in the prospectus that Google has, "a dual class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me." The company has not reported any treasury stock holdings as of the Q3 2004 report.

On June 1, 2005, Google shares gained nearly four percent after Credit Suisse First Boston raised its price target on the stock to $350. On that same day, rumors circulated in the financial community that Google would soon be included in the S&P 500.^[32] When companies are first listed on the S&P 500 they typically experience a bump in share price due to the rapid accumulation of the stock within index funds that track the S&P 500. The rumors, however, were premature and Google was not added to the S&P 500 until 2006. Nevertheless, on June 7, 2005, Google was valued at nearly $52 billion, making it one of the world's biggest media companies by stock market value.

On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference as π ≈ 3.14159265) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion. Google said it would use the money for "acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets".^[33]

On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m²) R&D center at NASA's Ames Research Center, and on December 31, 2005 Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership—see Partnerships below.

Additionally in 2005, Google formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help in the open source office program OpenOffice.org.^[34]

With Google's increased size comes more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google.^[35] Microsoft has been touting its Bing search engine to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. Hotmail), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live Local competes with Google Earth). In addition to an Internet Explorer replacement Google is designing its own Linux-based operating system called Chrome OS to directly compete with Microsoft Windows. There were also rumors of a Google web browser, fueled much by the fact that Google is the owner of the domain name "gbrowser.com". These were later proven when Google released Google Chrome. This corporate feud is most directly expressed in hiring offers and defections. Many Microsoft employees who worked on Internet Explorer have left to work for Google. This feud boiled over into the courts when Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice-president of Microsoft, quit Microsoft to work for Google. Microsoft sued to stop his move by citing Lee's non-compete contract (he had access to much sensitive information regarding Microsoft's plans in China).

Google and Microsoft reached a settlement out of court on December 22, 2005, the terms of which are confidential.^[36]

Click fraud has also become a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model."^[37] Some have suggested that Google is not doing enough to combat click fraud. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, called Google, "the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers", when it comes to click fraud.

While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has also recently began to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On January 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio.^[38] This will allow Google to combine two advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times.^[39] They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.

During the third quarter 2005 Google Conference Call, Eric Schmidt said, "We don't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build."

After months of speculation, Google was added to the Standard & Poor's 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006.^[40] Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based in Houston that had been acquired by ConocoPhillips.^[41] The day after the announcement Google's share price rose by 7%.^[42]

Over the course of the past decade, Google has become quite well known for its corporate culture and innovative, clean products, and has had a major impact on online culture.

Name[link]

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol,"^[43][44] which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. Page and Brin write in their original paper on PageRank ^[45]: "We chose our systems name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10¹⁰⁰ and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines."

However, Enid Blyton used the phrase "Google Bun" in The Magic Faraway Tree (published 1941) The Folk of the Faraway Tree (published 1946),^[46] and called a clown character "Google" in Circus Days Again (published 1942),^[47] and there is also the Googleplex Star Thinker from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb, "google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."^[48][49] The use of the term itself reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.^[44] In November 2009, the Global Language Monitor named "Google" No. 7 on its Top Words of the Decade list.^[50] In December 2009 the BBC highlighted Google in their "Portrait of the Decade (Words)" series.^[51]

Philanthropy[link]

In 2004, Google formed a non-profit philanthropic wing, Google.org, giving it a starting fund of $1 billion.^[52] The express mission of the organization is to help with the issues of climate change (see also global warming), global public health, and global poverty. Among its first projects is to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 mpg.^[53]

Acquisitions[link]

Main article: List of Google acquisitions

Since 2001, Google has acquired several small companies, often consisting of innovative teams and products. One of the earlier companies that Google bought was Pyra Labs. They were the creators of Blogger, a weblog publishing platform, first launched in 1999. This acquisition led to many premium features becoming free. Pyra Labs was originally formed by Evan Williams, yet he left Google in 2004. In early 2006, Google acquired Upstartle, a company responsible for the online collaborative word processor, Writely. The technology in this product was combined with Google Spreadsheets to become Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

The logo of YouTube, which in late 2006 was acquired by Google.

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would buy the popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion.^[54] The brand, YouTube, will continue to exist, and will not merge with Google Video. Meanwhile, Google Video signed an agreement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group, for both companies to deliver music videos to the site.^[55] The deal was finalized by November 13.^[56]

On October 31, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased JotSpot, a company that helped pioneer the market for collaborative, web-based business software to bolster its position in the online document arena.^[57]

On March 17, 2007, Google announced its acquisition of two more companies. The first is Gapminder's Trendalyzer software, a company that specializes in developing information technology for provision of free statistics in new visual and animated ways^[58] On the same day, Google also announced its acquisition of Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising company based in San Francisco, California.^[59]

Google also acquired PeakStream Technologies.

Partnerships[link]

Google has worked with several corporations, in order to improve production and services. On September 28, 2005,Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m²) R&D center at NASA's Ames Research Center. NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers.^[60] In October 2006, Google formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the open source office program OpenOffice.org.^[34]

Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21, 2005, including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a $1 billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL.^[61] As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium-video service within Google Video. This did not allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video services. Display advertising throughout the Google network will also increase.

In August 2003, Google signed a $900 million offer with News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit to provide search and advertising on MySpace and other News Corp. websites including IGN, AmericanIdol.com, Fox.com, and Rotten Tomatoes, although Fox Sports is not included as a deal already exists between News Corp. and MSN.^[62][63]

On December 6, 2006, British Sky Broadcasting released details of a Sky and Google alliance.^[64] This includes a feature where Gmail will link with Sky and host a mail service for Sky, incorporating the email domain "@sky.com".

In 2007, Google displaced America Online as a key partner and sponsor of the NORAD Tracks Santa program.^[65][66][67] Google Earth was used for the first time to give visitors to the website the impression that they were following Santa Claus' progress in 3-D.^[68] The program also made its presence known on YouTube in 2007 as part of its partnership with Google.^[69]

In January 2009, Google announced a partnership with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, allowing the Pope to have his own channel on YouTube.^[70]

New mobile top-level domain[link]

In coordination with several of the major corporations, including Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, and Ericsson, Google provided financial support in the launch of the .mobi top level domain created specifically for the mobile internet, stating that it is supporting the new domain extension to help set the standards that will define the future of mobile content and improve the experience of Google users.^[71] In early 2006, Google launched Google.mobi, a mobile search portal offering several Google mobile products, including stripped-down versions of its applications and services for mobile users.^[72] On September 17, 2007, Google launched, "Adsense for Mobile", a service to its publishing partners providing the ability to monetize their mobile websites through the targeted placement of mobile text ads.^[73] Also in September, Google acquired the mobile social networking site, Zingku.mobi to "provide people worldwide with direct access to Google applications, and ultimately the information they want and need, right from their mobile devices."^[74]

Legal battles[link]

Gonzales v. Google[link]

On Wednesday, January 18, 2006, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion to compel in United States district court in San Jose seeking a court order that would compel search engine company Google Inc. to turn over, "a multi-stage random sample of one million URL’s", from Google’s database, and a computer file with, "the text of each search string entered onto Google’s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query)."^[75] Google maintains that their policy has always been to assure its users' privacy and anonymity, and challenged the subpoena. On March 18, 2006, a federal judge ruled that while Google must surrender 50,000 random URLs, the Department of Justice did not meet the necessary burden to force Google to disclose any search terms entered by its users.

Bedrock Computer Technologies, LLC vs. Google, Inc[link]

A jury in Texas awarded Bedrock Computer Technologies $5 million in a patent lawsuit against Google.^[76][77] The patent allegedly covered use of hash tables with garbage collection and external chaining in the Red Hat Linux kernel. The judgment was later vacated by the court.^[78]

See also[link]

• Google
• Criticism of Google
• Sergey Brin
• Larry Page
• Google Easter Eggs

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio. (September 2005) ISBN 1-59184-088-0.
• Stross, Randall, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, New York : Free Press, September 2008. ISBN 978-1-4165-4691-7

External links[link]

• Google Corporate History (official)
• David Hart: On the Origins of Google National Science Foundation, August 17, 2004

Larry Page
Larry Page speaking at the European Parliament on June 17, 2009.
Born	Lawrence Page (1973-03-26) March 26, 1973 (age 39) Lansing, Michigan, U.S.
Residence	Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Michigan (B.S.) Stanford University (M.S.)
Occupation	Computer scientist, internet entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of Google Inc.
Salary	US$1[1]
Net worth	US$ 18.7 billion (2012)[1]
Title	CEO of Google
Spouse	Lucinda Southworth (m. 2007) «start: (2007)»"Marriage: Lucinda Southworth to Larry Page" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Larry_Page)
Children	1
Signature
Website
Google.com - Larry Page

Lawrence "Larry" Page^[2] (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. On April 4, 2011, he took on the role of chief executive officer of Google, replacing Eric Schmidt.^[3][4] As of 2012^[update], his personal wealth is estimated to be $18.7 billion.^[1] He is the inventor of PageRank, which became the foundation of Google's search ranking algorithm.^[5] Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake.

Early life and education[link]

Larry Page was born in Lansing, Michigan.^[6][7] His father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965 when the field was in its infancy, and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother were computer science professors at Michigan State University.^[8][9] Gloria Page, his mother, is Jewish but he was raised without religion.^[10]

Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991.^[11] He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks" (actually a line plotter),^[12] served as the president of the Eta Kappa Nu in Fall 1994,^[13] and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar Car team.

During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house "was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place". His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around". He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor."^[14] His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked". He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business . . . probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually".^[14]

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.^[15][16] His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got".^[17] Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).^[16] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.^[16]

John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'."^[16] Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:

"At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.

"The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry".^[16]

Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer Ph.D. candidates. Page, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Brin, around campus, and they later became good friends.^[18]

To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones.^[16] It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another.^[18] In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.^[16]

Business[link]

In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc.^[19] Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google. In January 2011 Google announced that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April the same year.^[20] Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar. On April 4, 2011, Page officially became the chief executive of Google, while Schmidt stepped down to become executive chairman.

Personal life[link]

Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island in 2007.^[21] Southworth is a research scientist and sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth.^[22][23][24] They have one child.

Other interests[link]

Page is an active investor in alternative energy companies, such as Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 244-mile (393 km) range battery electric vehicle.^[25] He continues to be committed to renewable energy technology, and with the help of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, promotes the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric cars and other alternative energy investments.^[14]

Brin and Page are the executive producers of the 2007 film Broken Arrows.^[26]

Awards and recognition[link]

PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards."^[27]

In 2002, Page, along with Sergey Brin, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[28]

In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...."^[29] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers...."^[30] He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[31] In 2002 the World Economic Forum named Page a Global Leader for Tomorrow and in 2004 the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.^[12]

In 2004, Page and Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2009 during graduation commencement ceremonies.^[32]

In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of billionaires and as the 11th richest person in the United States.^[1]

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (January 2012)

• Larry Page on Google+
• Google Corporate Information: Management
• America's Best Leaders
• Profile at BBC News
• Larry Page's Alumni Profile Composite
• Channel 4 News: "Google's Vision", May 23, 2006
• "The Searchmeisters" – profile on Page and Brin from the B'nai B'rith Magazine (Spring 2006)
• Video: Google Founders – Charlie Rose interview from 2001 (14 min)
• On the Origins of Google
• Why you should ignore VCs, Larry Page speaks at Stanford
• Why you should ignore experience, Experience is (sometimes) overrated.
• San Francisco Chronicle, Google Co-Founder's Search Ends
• The Page Girl

Sergey Brin
Born	Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин (1973-08-21) August 21, 1973 (age 38) Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union
Residence	Los Altos, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	University of Maryland (B.S. 1993) Stanford University (M.S. 1995)
Occupation	Computer scientist, Internet entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder of Google
Salary	$1[1]
Net worth	US$ 18.7 billion (2012)[1]
Religion	Judaism
Spouse	Anne Wojcicki[2]
Children	2
Signature
Website
Google.com – Sergey Brin

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is a Russian-American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies.^[3][4] As of 2012^[update], his personal wealth is estimated to be $18.7 billion.^[1] Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake.

Brin immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford University to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, with whom he later became friends. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin's data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in a rented garage.

The Economist magazine referred to Brin as an "Enlightenment Man", and someone who believes that "knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance", a philosophy that is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information "universally accessible and useful"^[5] and "Don't be evil".

Early life and education[link]

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow to Russian Jewish parents, Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University.^[6] His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.^[7][8]

Childhood in the Soviet Union[link]

In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to emigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story,^[9] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college". Although an official policy of anti-Semitism did not exist in the Soviet Union, Michael Brin claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities: "Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular..." Michael Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's. He said, "Nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish."^[10] At Moscow State University, Jews were required to take their entrance exams in different rooms from non-Jewish applicants, which were nicknamed "gas chambers", and they were marked on a harsher scale.^[11]

The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.^[10] Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted", but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in the United States. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more", he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave..."^[10]

Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. Malseed writes, "For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired". For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, afraid their request would be denied as it was for many refuseniks. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.^[10]

At an interview in October, 2000, Brin said, "I know the hard times that my parents went through there, and am very thankful that I was brought to the States."^[12] A decade earlier, in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before his 17th birthday, his father led a group of gifted high school math students, including Sergey, on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. "As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority" and he remembers that his first "impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car." Malseed adds, "On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, 'Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.'"^[10]

Education in the United States[link]

Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science in May 1993 with honors.^[13]

Brin began his graduate study in computer science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1993, he interned at Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.^[13] He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.^[14]

Search engine development[link]

During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said: "We're both kind of obnoxious." They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending 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 inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers."^[5] Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."^[15]

Combining their ideas, they "crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers" and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough "to cause problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure." But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.^[5]

As Mark Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. ... [soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."^[10]

The Economist magazine describes Brin's approach to life, like Page's, as based on a vision summed up by Google's motto, "of making all the world's information 'universally accessible and useful.'" Others have compared their vision to the impact of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of modern printing:

"In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg introduced Europe to the mechanical printing press, printing Bibles for mass consumption. The technology allowed for books and manuscripts – originally replicated by hand – to be printed at a much faster rate, thus spreading knowledge and helping to usher in the European Renaissance. . . Google has done a similar job."^[16]

The comparison was likewise noted by the authors of The Google Story: "Not since Gutenberg . . . has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google."^[9]:1

Not long after the two "cooked up their new engine for web searches, they began thinking about information that is today beyond the web", such as digitizing books, and expanding health information.^[5]

Personal life[link]

In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a B.S. in biology.^[2][17] She has an active interest in health information, and together she and Brin are developing new ways to improve access to it. As part of their efforts, they have brainstormed with leading researchers about the human genome project. "Brin instinctively regards genetics as a database and computing problem. So does his wife, who co-founded the firm, 23andMe", which lets people analyze and compare their own genetic makeup (consisting of 23 pairs of chromosomes).^[5] In a recent announcement at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, he said he hoped that some day everyone would learn their genetic code in order to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the data and try to repair bugs.^[5]

Brin's mother, Eugenia, has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. In 2008, he decided to make a donation to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated.^[18] Brin used the services of 23andMe and discovered that although Parkinson's is generally not hereditary, both he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene (G2019S) that puts the likelihood of his developing Parkinson's in later years between 20 and 80%.^[5] When asked whether ignorance was not bliss in such matters, he stated that his knowledge means that he can now take measures to ward off the disease. An editorial in The Economist magazine states that "Mr Brin regards his mutation of LRRK2 as a bug in his personal code, and thus as no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. By helping himself, he can therefore help others as well. He considers himself lucky. ... But Mr. Brin was making a much bigger point. Isn’t knowledge always good, and certainty always better than ignorance?"^[5]

Brin and his wife run The Brin Wojcicki Foundation.^[19]

In November, 2011 Brin and his wife's foundation, The Brin Wojcicki Foundation, awarded 500,000 dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation as it started its eighth annual fundraising campaign.

Censorship of Google in China[link]

Remembering his youth and his family's reasons for leaving the Soviet Union, he "agonized over Google’s decision to appease the communist government of China by allowing it to censor search engine results", but decided that the Chinese would still be better off than without having Google available.^[5] He explained his reasoning to Fortune magazine:

"We felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it."^[20]

On January 12, 2010, Google reported a large cyber attack on its computers and corporate infrastructure that began a month earlier, which included accessing numerous Gmail accounts and the theft of Google's intellectual property. After the attack was determined to have originated in China, the company stated that it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit the country altogether. The New York Times reported that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, but that the attack also targeted 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors."^[21][22] It was later reported that the attack included "one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide."^[23]

In late March, 2010, it officially discontinued its China-based search engine while keeping its uncensored Hong Kong site in operation. Speaking for Google, Brin stated during an interview, "One of the reasons I am glad we are making this move in China is that the China situation was really emboldening other countries to try and implement their own firewalls."^[24] During another interview with Spiegel, he added, "For us it has always been a discussion about how we can best fight for openness on the Internet. We believe that this is the best thing that we can do for preserving the principles of the openness and freedom of information on the Internet."^[25]

While only a few large companies so far pledged their support for the move, many Internet "freedom proponents are cheering the move," and it is "winning it praise in the U.S." from lawmakers.^[24][26] Senator Byron Dorgan stated that "Google's decision is a strong step in favor of freedom of expression and information."^[27] And Congressman Bob Goodlatte said, "I applaud Google for its courageous step to stop censoring search results on Google.com. Google has drawn a line in the sand and is shining a light on the very dark area of individual liberty restrictions in China."^[28] From the business perspective, many recognize that the move is likely to affect Google's profits: "Google is going to pay a heavy price for its move, which is why it deserves praise for refusing to censor its service in China."^[29] The New Republic adds that "Google seems to have arrived at the same link that was obvious to Andrei Sakharov: the one between science and freedom," referring to the move as "heroism."^[30]

Awards and recognition[link]

In 2002, Brin, along with Larry Page, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[31]

In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...".^[32] And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering", and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..."^[33]