3. Biography: Google Founders, Sergey Brin & Larry Page

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of Google, currently the Internet's most popular search engine, while they were only graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan where his parents were computer science professors at Michigan State University. Page attended the Okemos Montessori School in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School (1991). He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honours. Eager to advance in his career, Page decided to study for a Ph.D degree. He was admitted to the prestigious doctoral program in computer science at Stanford University. On an introductory weekend at the Palo Alto campus for new students, he met Sergey Brin.

A native of Moscow, Russia, Brin was also the son of Michael Brin and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother is a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He came to the United States with his family when he was six. His father taught math at the University of Maryland, and it was from that school's College Park campus that Brin earned an undergraduate degree in computer science and math.

Brin was already enrolled in Stanford's PhD program when Page arrived in 1995. He was working on data mining, the idea of taking large amounts of data, analyzing it for patterns and trying to extract relationships that are useful. One weekend Brin was assigned to a team that showed the new doctoral students around campus, and Page was in his group. According to interviews and reports, the two often disagreed with each other and argued a lot, but soon found themselves working together on a research project. That 1996 paper, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", became the basis for the Google search engine.

Page and Brin invented an algorithm that searches all the hypertext documents in cyberspace, which are the basis for Web pages on the Internet. They wanted to create a search tool that would find the most relevant Web page first. "PageRank", the search engine with Page and Brin's unique algorithm is named after Page.

Page and Brin  named their company "Google," after the mathematical term Googol, which specified the number one followed by a hundred zeros. They took it to Andy Bechtolsheim who offered to write them a check of $100,000 on the spot. They went on to raise more money from friends, family, and then from venture capital firms that funded new businesses. By the end of 1999 they had set up headquarters in an office park in Mountain View, and had officially launched the site.

"Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world." 

- Sergey Brin

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ow-Sh/Page-Larry-and-Brin-Sergey.html