Sergey Brin and Larry Page - Founder of Google

Sergey Brin and Larry Page

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. When he was six years old, Brin emigrated to the U.S. with his parents and younger brother, Samuel, due to increasing anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R. When Brin was nine years old, his father gave him his first computer, a Commodore 64. From that point on, Brin’s interest in mathematics and computers only grew. He attended Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, followed by Eleanor Roosevelt High School. In 1993, Brin graduated from the University of Maryland with an honours degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. He then received a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, allowing him to pursue his Master’s degree in Computer Science at Stanford University, which he received in 1995. Although he had intended to pursue a Ph.D., a side project with fellow Stanford student Larry Page would soon distract his attention.

Lawrence Edward Page was born on March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl, is a computer science professor at Michigan State University, where his mother, Gloria, also works as a computer-programming teacher. Page attended East Lansing High School before earning his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. He then went on to earn his Master’s degree from Stanford University.

Page admits that the doctoral program was scary. But, it was while Page was pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford that he met fellow student Brin. Although the two initially didn’t hit it off, they soon found a common interest in data-mining and retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, they wrote a paper entitled, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which has today become the tenth most accessed scholarly paper at Stanford.

Page and Brin began to think about the relationship between websites on the Internet, soon realizing that not all of them were created equal. They created a software system called “BackRub”, a search engine that checked backlinks to determine one site’s importance over another. Soon, the two had dropped out of university – although Brin is officially still on leave from Stanford – and began devoting themselves full-time to their thesis idea.

Working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP) its goal was to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library and this was made possible as it was funded through the National Science Foundation among other federal agencies. 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. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea 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.

Those research did not go in vain as few years ahead from that, Google was born and was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful “and the company's unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil"

Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software including email, an office suite, and social networking. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system, found on specialized netbooks called Chromebooks. Google has increasingly become a hardware company with its cooperation with major electronics manufacturers on its high-end Nexus series of devices and its acquisition of Motorola Mobility in May 2012,as well as the construction of fiber-optic infrastructure in Kansas City as part of the Google Fiber broadband Internet service project. Google has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centers around the world, and process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.

As of September 2012 Alexa listed the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites as being in the top hundred, as well as several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger. Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.