The Genius of Google: How Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and a Search Engine Changed the World
INTRODUCTION The campus of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View California is full of bikes for employees to ride from building to building The office in Palo Alto California looked like a playground for grown-ups Workers lounged on yoga balls and decorated their desks with swirly lava lamps They built with LEGO bricks They brought their dogs cats and even pet lizards to the office No question this was a fun place to work But when it came to their 4
jobs these workers were dead serious They were the early employees of Google and their accomplishments would change the world Google employees enjoy playful office features including slides between levels 5
Stanford University is one of eight Ivy League schools in the United States These schools are known for their academic excellence and social influence CHAPTER 1 THE BEGINNING Google began at Stanford University in California There in the summer of 1995 Sergey Brin met Larry Page Brin was starting his second year of graduate school Page would soon be a first-year graduate student Both young men were studying computer science 6
At this time the World Wide Web was just a few years old But it was growing quickly By early 1996 the web had about one hundred thousand websites and ten million documents Page was intrigued by all this data He was particularly interested in the hyperlinks between web pages He wanted to know which pages had the most backlinks or links that connect from other sites Incoming links were sort of like recommendations from other sites So pages with more backlinks were usually more informative and accurate than those with fewer backlinks For his final project Page decided to map out the entire web and study the links He used a crawler to search through the web page by page and link by link Meanwhile Brin was interested in data mining When he learned about Page’s map of the web he was intrigued He loved the idea of studying the vast data on the web He decided to join Page’s project A 2000 guide to searching the web lists popular search engines at the time including Infoseek Lycos and MetaCrawler 7
