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Who Founded Google?

It began as a school project for two young Stanford University students in 1996. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both PhD candidates, were assigned to work on the Sanford Digital Library Project which had a goal of ‘developing the enabling technologies for an integrated and single universal digital library.’ They went on to create the largest and most popular search engines in the world, Google with each of them having a net worth of over $12 billion as of 2009.

Lawrence ‘Larry’ Page
Larry Page began his computer career at a very young age, following in the footsteps of his parents, both computer science professors at Michigan State University of which the youngest Page sibling later attended and received a Bachelors of Science degree (with honors) in computer engineering. According to Page, his parents had computers and computer parts ‘all around the house’ in addition to Popular Science magazines. This combination intrigued the young child and soon he was disassembling everything he could get his hands on – from toasters to television sets. He wanted to see how things worked.

Page claims to have been the first student in his elementary school to have turned in a paper completed on a word processor his older brother taught him how to use.

Page also holds a Masters degree in Computer Sciences from Sanford University where he created an inkjet printer from Lego bricks. He was in search of a dissertation subject and was considering the World Wide Web’s mathematical properties which could be linked to a huge structured graph. Terry Winograd, Page’s supervisor, confidently told him to pursue this initiative. Focusing on which web pages link to a given site is what Page focused on next. Page considered the nature and number of ‘backlinks’ to be most valuable information about a particular webpage. He nicknamed his project ‘Backrub’ and was paired with fellow PhD student, Sergey Brin.

A writer for Wired magazine wrote that Page thought of the entire web as being loosely based on the premise of citations and if he could device a program to count and qualify each of the backlinks on the Web, then the Web could become a much more valuable place for everyone who uses it.

Enter Sergey Brin, a polymath student who could not resolve himself to a single thesis topic until he heard about Page’s project. The premise fascinated Brin. Not only did he want ‘in on this’ because he liked Larry, but he wanted to be a part of this project because it dealt with the Web – something Brin felt was representing all human knowledge.

Sergey Brin
A Soviet-born American – his family immigrated to the U.S. when he was only six years old – he wanted to be like his father and grandfather and studied mathematics and double majored with computer sciences.

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow to Russian-Jewish parents, his mother is now a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and his father a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.  

Brin received his Bachelors of Science from degree in mathematics and computer sciences from the University of Maryland – College Park and went on to obtain a Masters in Computer Sciences at Sanford University where he met Larry Page on a tour of the campus the first week of school.

The pair wrote was considered a major contribution to understanding the Internet entitled “The Anatomy of Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” They were working on their search engine creation day and night and caused problems for the universities computer infrastructure so they suspended their PhD’s and began their own system. 

Today Brin and Page are using their millions to help people around the world in various humanitarian and environmental projects.