organization put the software for the web into the public domain making it free for anyone to use By 1995 there were already about ten million documents on the World Wide Web 5 Berners-Lee’s work set the stage for the modern information age NAVIGATING THE WEB Around this time Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford University in California They were working toward PhDs in computer science They came up with a new idea to help people find what they were looking for online Their system would analyze how popular websites were then use that information to help rank them in search results In the process the young men developed a new way of searching the web They called their search engine Google a deliberate misspelling of the word googol which is a number equal to one followed by 100 zeros The first version went live on the Stanford University website in 1997 It had a refreshingly clean look it was simple to use and it had no ads In 1998 Page and Brin decided to leave school to start their own company 10
GOOGLE GROWS The site’s popularity grew fast Google became a common term meaning to conduct a computer search 6 In 2006 it was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary For a long time people wondered how a search engine company could make money After all a good search engine sent users away from the search engine to the website they were looking for But Google stayed in business at first relying on investments When Google did eventually start to show advertisements they were separated from search results and they only appeared when they were related to the search terms The enormous volume of searches that happen every day means this advertising revenue adds up to billions of dollars per year STANFORD START-UPS In the 1980s and 1990s Stanford University was a good place for people to start a tech company The university had an Office of Technology Licensing It helped students get patents to protect their inventions Located in Silicon Valley the heart of the tech industry Stanford is surrounded by venture capitalists These people invest large amounts of money to help new companies Stanford also allowed its professors to keep a stake in any companies formed from projects they advised Many computer companies came from this environment In the 1980s came Sun Microsystems a company that developed computer hardware and software Its cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim gave Google its first 100,000 check 7 In the 1990s came Excite a search company founded by Stanford alumni and Yahoo an information directory and search company founded by two Stanford PhD candidates 11
Over the last two decades Google has changed the way the world thinks of computers and the internet As a result of the company’s success Google can carry out major projects intended to advance the world’s access to technology For example the company embarked on a project to digitize entire college libraries making them accessible and searchable to everyone This project changed the way people do research People can access this information from anywhere with an internet connection In 2004 the company offered a mission statement for investors To do great things for the world 8 Some people worry that Google’s great things present dangers to personal privacy or that the company controls too much information But however people feel about Google it is clear that what started in a college dorm room a few decades ago has changed the world 12
KEY PLAYERS SERGEY BRIN AND LARRY PAGE It made sense that Sergey Brin and Larry Page would end up working together They grew up with similar backgrounds and both are brilliant and determined Brin’s father was a mathematician and professor and his mother was a NASA scientist When he was a child Brin and his family immigrated to the United States from Russia Brin graduated from college when he was 19 years younger than most students and started graduate school at Stanford University in 1994 Despite his young age he passed all his required exams within his first year so he could take the classes he wanted For his part Page was interested in computers from an early age His father taught computer science and his mother taught computer programming at Michigan State University As a first grader Page was the first student in his class to turn in a paper written and printed from a computer And he once took apart all of the household power tools to see how they worked His parents were the household power tools to see how they worked His parents were angry because he couldn’t put them back together angry because he couldn’t put them back together By 2018 Brin left and left left and By 2018 Brin left and right Page right would right would Page right would become two of the become two of the wealthiest people on wealthiest people on the planet the planet 13
