The Google Guys

By Chris Taylor

How did a couple of computer-science geeks transform themselves into global superstars? For the answer, do a search for a paper that Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Michigan native Larry Page wrote in 1997 when they were pursuing Ph.D.s in computer science at Stanford. The title, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," doesn't trip off the tongue, but the authors get right to the point: "In this paper, we present Google."

Using some complex math, Page and Brin figured out how to index and rank websites in the order of how often they were linked to--and to return search results in that order. The two were so certain of their idea's merits that they quit school to start a company. Their business naivete was a plus, helping them avoid many common mistakes of the dotcom age. For instance, the site went live before Page and Brin had thought to hire a webmaster. So while search giants like Yahoo were filling their home pages with news headlines, stock quotes and sports scores, Google had nothing but a search box and logo. "Other companies would boast about how users spent 45 minutes on their site," says Page. "We wanted people to spend a minimum amount of time on Google. The faster they got their results, the more they'd use it." And use it they did. Six years later, Google has indexed 4 billion Web pages, sees 200 million searches every day and has entered the language as a verb. Many of us wonder what we ever did without it. --By Chris Taylor