Word: brin
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When they first met as Ph.D. students, the pair say they found each other obnoxious--"I still find him obnoxious," adds Brin--but were thrust together by a computer-science project aimed at devising better ways of searching the Web. From the start, it was hard-core geek love...
...there's one thing in the Googleplex that's cooler and more popular than free ice cream, it's the company's product (found, of course, at google.com) The brainchild of Stanford University pals Larry Page, 27, and Sergey Brin, 26, Google is the Web's largest and hippest search engine. In just two years it has gained a reputation for uncanny speed and accuracy, delivering exactly what you're looking for in a fraction of a second. The site now does this 40 million times a day--not quite a googol (10100, which is 1 followed by 100 zeroes...
...smiling more than Page and Brin, who seem certain to become billionaires when the company goes public, probably sometime next year. (In an unusual alliance, it's being backed by the valley's two major venture-capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.) Page is full of wonkish bonhomie, the kind of guy who rides an electric scooter to work and loves to tell you about the time he built a working inkjet printer out of Legos. Brin acts aloof and acerbic, ever ready to toss a quip at his partner. They make a great comedy...
Clearly, search engines needed to be more intuitive, to rank quality over quantity. But how can a computer program understand what we think of as the good stuff? To Page and Brin this was more than an academic puzzler. Multiply the man-hours corporations spend on online research by the increasing chaos of the Web and you have millions of dollars leaking out of the economy. "If we deal with that better," says Page, "we're changing the world...
...different, and it works--like much else about Google. Page and Brin license the Google engine to other dotcoms, but they charge per search instead of the usual flat rate, which is why they expect to turn a profit soon. They built the site with parts from 6,000 off-the-shelf PCs--huge, unruly piles of spaghetti wiring and lasagna-layered motherboards that actually run cheaper and faster than mess-free, million-dollar servers. And they refuse to offer the top-heavy extras you'll find crammed onto every other major search engine (stock quotes, sports scores...