Google: The Company and Its Founders - Sharyland ISD

HUMBLE BEGINNINGSInternet links. He applied this theory by suggestingthat Internet sites with the most links to them weremore important than sites with fewer links, as judgedby Internet users. He also believed a back link withmore back links to it carried more clout than onewith fewer. If Page could follow back links on theWeb, he could assign value to each Web site.A PARTNERSHIP BLOOMSEncouraged by Professor Terry Winograd, Pageturned his idea into a PhD thesis. By this time,fellow student and friend Sergey Brin had joinedPage on the project. They began working on theiridea in January 1996. Page told one of his advisershis research would require him to download theentire World Wide Web onto hisdesktop computer in order toanalyze the data. Many colleaguesthought Page’s idea was absurd.With Brin’s help, Pagecreated a search engine he calledBackRub to follow back linkson the Internet. The young menneeded an algorithm—a complexmathematical formula—to analyze“It wasn’t that [Brin and Page]sat down and said, ‘Let’s buildthe next great search engine.’They were trying to solve interestingproblems and stumbledupon some neat ideas.” 3—Rajeev Motwani,Stanford Universitycomputer science professor11