The Google Guys (5 page)
Authors: Richard L. Brandt
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 1990s. Since anyone sufficiently technical could tap into the Internet with their own computer, it was soon co-opted by groups of invaders its builders never envisioned. The true Internet pioneers were hackers, online game players, software pirates, and independent programmers who wanted to share their creations with the world. The Open Source advocates soon came to power.
But Larry and Sergey have now ventured beyond the truly dedicated Open Source movement by creating a corporate giant. And for that, most of the Internet purists have labeled them as evil. Blog postings from the tech elite complain that the pair has created a dangerous monopoly, a huge corporation that is taking over the Internet, filing patents and exploiting the Internet for profit.
Larry and Sergey still dominate Google. One or both of themâusually Larryâstill interviews major candidates for employment, particularly those in engineering. They are rabidly dedicated to Google, and promote its missionâto organize and make available all the world's informationâwith the zeal of evangelical cultists. And they're willing to take on anyone, or any company, that stands in their way.
Chapter 2
Accidental Entrepreneurs
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
âWoody Allen
When Ptolemy created his library, he encountered problems nobody had faced before. The biggest was that no one had ever tried to organize such a massive collection of scrolls so that people could find what they wanted. It's difficult to locate the text you want among half a million papyrus scrolls stacked randomly on shelves. The
Republic
by any other name just ain't the same as Plato's.
Republic
by any other name just ain't the same as Plato's.
That's where the great librarians of Alexandria stepped in. The first librarian of the Alexandria library was a man named Zenodotus. He struck upon the most enduring classification system ever dreamed up by humankind. He alphabetized the scrolls of Alexandria. In short, a simple concept that we now take for granted was not dreamed up until the Library of Alexandria made it necessary, five hundred years after the Greeks developed their alphabet. As the library grew, even that system was not sufficient. Callimachus, a poet and scholar believed to be the second or third librarian, created the first bibliography. He divided the documents into several classesârhetoric, law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science, and miscellaneaâin a document called the
Pinakes ton en pase paideia dialampsanton kai hon synegrapsan
(“List of those who distinguished themselves in all branches of learning, and their writings”). The Pinakes alone was said to have taken up some 120 scrolls. It was probably never completed, and did not survive to modern times. But for generations it was the major source of research for scholars, and it became the model for bibliographies in the millennia since.
Pinakes ton en pase paideia dialampsanton kai hon synegrapsan
(“List of those who distinguished themselves in all branches of learning, and their writings”). The Pinakes alone was said to have taken up some 120 scrolls. It was probably never completed, and did not survive to modern times. But for generations it was the major source of research for scholars, and it became the model for bibliographies in the millennia since.
And the innovations just kept coming. A poet named Philotas wrote the first comprehensive dictionary at the library, which Zenodotus improved by alphabetizing it. Didymus wrote commentaries and glossaries of the works. Dionysius Thrax created the first book on grammar, which became the standard text on Greek grammar for a thousand years and influenced the Roman creation of Latin grammars. The concepts dreamed up two millennia ago in Alexandria are still used today.
I
n their early days at Stanford, Larry and Sergey did not plan to make their search engine the core of whatever company they started. They viewed it as a scholarly research project, new technology that could find just the right documents in the giant library of the Internet.
n their early days at Stanford, Larry and Sergey did not plan to make their search engine the core of whatever company they started. They viewed it as a scholarly research project, new technology that could find just the right documents in the giant library of the Internet.
In 1997, while still graduate students working on Ph.D.s in computer science at Stanford, they showed great enthusiasm when discussing their creation. One person they enjoyed chatting with was Andrei Broder, a corporate researcher at a Silicon Valley company called Systems Research Center, where he led the team that created the hottest search engine of the time, AltaVista. Broder, a Stanford alumnus, used to visit the campus to see what interesting projects were in the works. Two of the bright graduate students he would occasionally chat with over coffee were Larry and Sergey.
Broder found them to be “obviously very intelligent, and out to reinvent the world.” But when the discussion turned to the topic of making money from the technology, Broder found that Page had a profound difference of philosophy on the subject. “It was a very funny thing about Larry,” Broder recalls. “He was very adamant about search engines not being owned by commercial entities. He said it should all be done by a nonprofit. I guess Larry has changed his mind about that.”
Brian Lent agrees with that view. He worked with Larry and Sergey on their search engine project for a while, until deciding to head off and join a start-up. (He's now CEO of Medio Systems Inc., which sells search and advertising systems for mobile phone makers.) The problem with the Google search engine at the time, Lent recalls, is that Larry and Sergey didn't want to commercialize it, and Lent was anxious to become an entrepreneur. Their mantra at the time was more socialistic than entrepreneurial. “Originally, âDon't be evil' was âDon't go commercial,' ” says Lent.
That view was more Larry's than Sergey's. While at Stanford, Sergey wrote a scholarly paper about their creation, titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” Still, in that paper, he argued against an ad-supported service as a corrupting influence. “Advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” he wrote.
But contrary to many reports, the two weren't against corporations per se. Any graduate student who applies to Stanford, the genesis of Silicon Valley, is keenly aware that it's a great place from which to launch a company. Larry and Sergey just didn't expect Google to be the fountain that would quench their thirst to be entrepreneurs. They felt that a search engine was too important to be corrupted by financial interests.
Craig Silverstein, another computer science Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, helped get the company started as employee number one. He was the one who didn't really want to start a company. But, he recalls, Larry and Sergey did. “Larry always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” says Silverstein. “He always thought big about what the company would be. Sergey was a good partner for that. He thought the same way.” Silverstein ended up putting his academic career on hold in order to join Google, where he still works.
Finding Hidden MeaningLarry stumbled his way into creating a search engine almost by chance, pushed by two different forcesâa government-funded research project and the rise of the Internet. Their work was funded by a project called the Digital Library Initiative, which started as an attempt by the Department of Defense to make it easier to find computer research papers electronically.
DLI originally had nothing to do with the Internet, which in 1994 was not yet a major force in the digital world. Stanford's original grant proposal to DLI that year didn't even mention the Internet.
But in 1994, Netscape Communications released its graphical Web browser, and the following year, the world suddenly had a system to archive and share anything, making DLI redundant. It was also the year that Yahoo Inc. was started. “The Internet completely changed things underneath us,” said Professor Hector Garcia-Molina, chair of Stanford's Computer Science Department at the time.
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1
Whenever a new technology comes along, few people really figure out how to exploit it properly. Generally, it's the second generation of companies that makes the real advances. That was true for search engines. Throughout the 1990s, search engines primarily retrieved pages according to how many times given key words were found on a site. These engines didn't take advantage of the interconnected properties of the Internet other than that they could find sites and archive their information. The new technology that the Internet demanded did not yet exist. Larry created it.
When Google's search engine was officially launched in December 1998, it was distinguished by one big unique attribute: it worked.
At its core is the PageRank system, invented by Larry (and named after him) while he was working on his Ph.D. It takes advantage of the unique properties of the Webâthe network of links that makes its name so apt.
Garcia-Molina recalls how it all started. He was Page's adviser, and one day in 1995 his student came into his office to show him a neat trick he had discovered. The AltaVista search engine not only collected key words from sites, but could also show what other sites linked to them. AltaVista did not exploit this link information in the way Google would, but that day in Garcia-Molina's office, Page suggested it would be a good way to rank the importance of sites.
At first, it was just a game. “We had lots of fun that day seeing which computer science pages were most popular among the different universities,” recalls Garcia-Molina. They were pleased to find that Stanford's database group, for example, drew more links than a similar department at rival University of Wisconsin.
Larry had his own idea about links. He told Garcia-Molina, “If this is so important to us, why not make it part of the search process?”
Larry's idea was inspired by his scientific background. It was well known in the scientific community that when a researcher cites your paper in his own, it lends yours more credibility. The more citations you get, the more important your paper is perceived by the research community. This idea was codified in the “Science Citation Index” created in 1960 by Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information. Larry reasoned that Web links were analogous to scientific citations, and those with the most links probably were the most popular and would prove most useful to searchers. Those were the sites that should be listed first in the search results. He then began creating his own software for analyzing links between sites.
This required some tricky programming. Not only did the system count links to a particular site, it went a step further by determining the importance of the sites doing the linking. This was done by counting the links to the sites one link back. This increased the complexity of the analysis enormously; in order to calculate relevance, PageRank also had to track the links two steps back and correlate that data with the key words. Larry first called the system BackRub, because of its property of tracing links backward. But he later settled on the more sophisticated PageRank, a double entendre with his surname.
Sergey also fell into search engine research by chance. As a math and computer science major in the doctoral program at Stanford, he was working on a research project within the database group. In 1995, he and Brian Lent decided to try their minds on another computer science discipline called “associative data mining.” This is the process of finding pieces of information that commonly occur together. Retailers use it to search through their sales records and determine whether different items are frequently bought together by customers. Data mining was, however, a new field for computer science. It required archiving masses of Web data, so Sergey had to write a “crawler” programâsoftware that visits Web sites, summarizes their content, and stores the data in a central location accessible to graduate students and search companies. Other search engines already had their own crawlers.
Sergey is a terrific programmer and engineer. His data mining work, using the Internet, involved parsing through huge amounts of data. “He did it on a scale that others would not have even contemplated,” says Jeffrey Ullman, Sergey's adviser. (Sergey's paper outlining the Google search engine was itself cited in another scientific paper, “Quality of Service and the Electronic Newspaper: The Etel Solution.”)
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Sergey is also a clever hardware engineer. He needed disk drives to store the data he collected, but had very little money, so he bought the cheapest drives he could find. But when he tried them out, they weren't fast enough. Instead of throwing them out, he figured out a way to make them work anyway, by doubling the number of terminals on the drive connections. “I had never thought of doing that,” says Ullman. “This was engineering of the first order.”
Their separate projects brought Larry and Sergey together in late 1995. “I was chatting with Larry a lot,” recalls Sergey. “He and I got along pretty well.”
3
If Larry wanted to search the Web, he also needed a crawler. So he recruited Sergey to the Digital Libraries project, combining his search technology with Sergey's Web crawler.
3
If Larry wanted to search the Web, he also needed a crawler. So he recruited Sergey to the Digital Libraries project, combining his search technology with Sergey's Web crawler.
They made a great combination. “Sergey likes math things,” says Stanford professor Andreas Paepcke, who headed the Digital Libraries project. “Larry just wanted to build. It just kind of grew.”
Scott Hassan, another Stanford grad student who worked with Larry and Sergey, recalls that it was mainly Larry's project. “For Larry, it was his primary thing. Sergey was just doing it because it was interesting to him.” They generally worked late into the night on indexing and parsing Web pages at a Fresh Choice restaurant in Palo Alto, which offered a “Student's Special” buffet for five dollars. They often toiled until 5:00 A.M.
There Will Never Be Another YahooAt Stanford, Larry and Sergey's search engine could analyze thirty to fifty pages a second. Two years later, that rose to about a thousand a second. Today, it's millions. It took a lot of research and programming to make it work. “We developed a lot of math to solve that problem,” Sergey told an interviewer in 2000. “We convert the entire Web into a big equation with several hundred million variables.”
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They played around with different names for their search engine. One of them was the “What Box.” “But then we decided that sounded like wet box, which sounded like some kind of porn site,” Sergey recalled.
5
Looking for a big number, they intended to call the crawler Googolâa word coined by the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner for the number 10
100
. Kasner simply wanted to name the biggest number anyone had ever given a name. He then also coined another name, the Googolplex, which is ten to the power of googol. (Larry and Sergey later adopted the name GooglePlex for their corporate campus.)
5
Looking for a big number, they intended to call the crawler Googolâa word coined by the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner for the number 10
100
. Kasner simply wanted to name the biggest number anyone had ever given a name. He then also coined another name, the Googolplex, which is ten to the power of googol. (Larry and Sergey later adopted the name GooglePlex for their corporate campus.)
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