Sunday, January 27, 2008
The co-founder of Google and the fifth-richest American, Sergey Brin was born in Moscow to mathematicians who moved to the United States (where his father took a job in the University of Maryland's mathematics department) in 1979, shortly before he began grade school. Brin inherited his parents' gift for mathematics, and attended UM after high school, graduating with a degree in math and computer science in 1993, as well as a Master's degree from Stanford in 1995.
While at Stanford, Brin's interest was drawn to the internet, which was then on the cusp of its first real mainstream popularity, thanks to a growing awareness of online services like Prodigy and America Online, and the development of the first graphical browsers for the World Wide Web, which would shortly transform the internet from its text-only beginnings to the multimedia playground it became. Several of his papers dealt with data mining and pattern extraction, things that would be useful on a bigger and more crowded internet. When he met fellow Stanford grad student Larry Page, the two discovered a mutual interest in data mining, which led to their co-authorship of the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," which continues to be relevant to the field of search engines today, more than ten years later.
The following January, the two students began developing a search engine they called "BackRub." Search engines needed to do more than merely find material online, because there was now too much of it to sift through -- they needed to analyze what was found in order to identify the likeliest desired results. While other engines ranked results based on data within the web page, Brin and Page's engine ranked them based on the relationships between web pages -- web pages that were linked to by a large number of other web pages were presumed to be more valuable results, and were given a higher ranking.
The thesis seemed sound, and stood up to testing, and in 1998, Google, Inc., was incorporated -- "BackRub" had been renamed to Google, a deliberate misspelling of googol (a one followed by 100 zeros), a reference to the vast amount of information the engine sifted through. Like many technology start-ups, the company soon relocated to Palo Alto, before moving to Mountain View in 2003, where Google's headquarters -- the Googleplex -- remain today. The search engine's popularity was driven by its efficiency not only in design but in presentation -- Google ads are text-only to keep the layout uncluttered and ensure fast loading times. As Google became the best-known name in search engines, even entering the dictionary as a verb, the brand was extended to other areas: Google offers everything from an RSS feed reader and online calendar to collaborative applications like Google Documents and desktop software like Picasa. The company went public in 2004, and has since acquired the popular Youtube video-sharing site.
Brin continues to serve as Google Inc.'s President of Technology.
