Google, 1998: the search engine that counted trust
On a morning in August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim — co-founder of Sun Microsystems — watched two Stanford PhD students demonstrate a search engine on a laptop and pulled out his checkbook. He wrote a check for $100,000, made out to “Google Inc.,” then left to make another meeting. The problem Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered after he drove away was that Google Inc. did not yet exist. There was no corporation to receive the money. They went home and incorporated.
Page and Brin had first met three years earlier, in the summer of 1995, when Brin was volunteering to give prospective Stanford PhD students a campus tour — Page was among the prospects. By 1996, Page had started a dissertation project on the structure of the World Wide Web: which pages linked to which, and what those patterns implied about importance. He called the prototype BackRub, a nod to the backlinks it mapped, and ran it on Stanford’s servers until the bandwidth consumption drew complaints from the network administrators. The research was partly supported by the NSF’s Digital Libraries Initiative, a federal effort to organize knowledge at scale. Brin joined. Together they developed PageRank — named, with only modest modesty, for Page himself — which ranked a webpage higher the more that high-quality pages pointed to it: a measure of reputation rather than repetition.
Every other major search engine in 1997 ranked results by how often a search term appeared on the page. AltaVista, Excite, Lycos: they were counting words. PageRank counted endorsements instead, treating every hyperlink as a vote cast by the page that hosted it. The difference in quality was obvious to anyone who tried both, and word spread through Stanford faster than the servers could handle.
Google Inc. formally incorporated on September 4, 1998, and moved into the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, who rented the space to the founders for $1,700 a month. Wojcicki — a Stanford alumna who had bought the house partly to offset the mortgage with rental income — would later become CEO of YouTube. The name came from a deliberate misspelling of googol, the number one followed by a hundred zeros, chosen because it fit, in Page and Brin’s own description, “our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”
In early 1999, Page and Brin approached Excite — one of the era’s dominant web portals — and offered the entire technology for $1 million. CEO George Bell declined. The price fell to $750,000. Bell declined again. It ranks among the worst single business decisions in Silicon Valley history, though the competition for that title is genuinely fierce.
What PageRank changed was the epistemology of the web. Before it, the internet was vast and effectively unnavigable — a library where the books had no call numbers and the catalog had been set on fire. PageRank imposed a continuous hierarchy on the visible web, governed by the aggregate behavior of every link every webmaster had ever published. For the first time, there was a working answer to a question no one had fully solved: out of a billion pages, which one should you read first?
The answer is still being computed. Right now, a server farm the size of a small town is running the math, and the result determines what several billion people read when they ask a question.
Sources
- History of Google — Wikipedia — founding date, Bechtolsheim’s check, Page and Brin’s meeting in 1995, the Excite rejection, Susan Wojcicki’s garage, the “googol” etymology.
- On the Origins of Google — NSF — NSF Digital Libraries Initiative funding for BackRub, Page and Brin’s research context at Stanford.