Lawrence Edward Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, where Lawrence's mother, Gloria, also taught computer programming. The Page family was full of first-generation personal computers and scientific magazines, and young Larry, as he was called immersed himself in them. Significantly, his older brother, Carl Page, Jr., also became a successful internet entrepreneur.
Larry Page attended a Montessoro school in the primary grades and later graduated from East Lansing High School. He was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the University's solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology. After graduating with a B.s. in computer engineering, he pursued graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was here that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the world wide web. It was also at Stanford that he first met fellow computer science graduate student Sergey Brin and recruited him to join his research project.
The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining the number of Web pages linked to any one given page. Existing facilities for exploring the web could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of web sites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a web document's relevance to a user's search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new 'Page Rank' mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey Brin.
Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1973. He immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of six and grew up in Adelphi, Maryland. His father, Michael Brin, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. Like Larry Page, he attended a Montessori scholl as a small child. He graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 1990 and entered the University of Maryland, College Park. In only theree years, he graduated with highest honors in mathematics and computer science. He entered graduate school at Stanford University with a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Brin soon authored more than a dozen papers on data mining and pattern
extraction for leading academic journals, including " Extrating Patterns
and Relations from the World Wide Web, " "Scalable Techniques for
Mining Casual Structures," "Dynamic Item Set Counting and Implication
Rules for Market Basket Data," and "Beyond Market Baskets:
Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations." He also created a website
for film ratings and designed a software application to translate documents
from Tex, the text processing language often used for scientific papers, to
HTML (hypertext markup language), the code in which web pages are written.
Together, Page and Brin wrote
the paper "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High
Dimensionality," and followed it with "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine." The latter paper quickly became one of
the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the Internet. For a
time, Page and Brin ran the prototype of their search engine, which they named
"BackRub," on an assortment of inexpensive personal computers stored
in Larry Page's dorm room. Word quickly spread beyond the walls of Stanford
that the two graduate students had created something far more useful than
existing search technology.
They registered the domain name
Google.com in 1997. The domain name was derived from the term
"googol," the very large number written as a one followed by 100
zeros, an expression of the vast universe of data the Google search engine was
designed to explore. Page and Brin incorporated Google as a privately held
company in 1998 and relocated their servers from Larry Page's dorm room to a
friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Having completed their Master's
degrees, they took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program to concentrate on
building their business. At first, Larry Page served as the company's CEO,
Sergey Brin as its president. Their stated mission was "to organize the
world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." After
quickly outgrowing a series of office locations, the company leased a complex
of buildings in Mountain View, California in 1999. Google has since purchased
the entire property, known as the Googleplex, one of the most unusual and
innovative workplaces in the world, replete with exercise and recreational
facilities.
By 2001, a vast number of
once-promising Internet start-ups had folded, but Google was growing
explosively and turning a profit. Page and Brin recruited Novell executive Eric
Schmidt to serve as CEO, with Larry Page taking the role of President for
Products, and Sergey Brin as President for Technology. The three have continued
to run the enterprise as a triumvirate ever since. Google's initial public
offering in 2004 raised $1.67 billion, giving the company a market
capitalization of $23 billion. A number of Google employees with shares in the
company became millionaires overnight, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin found
themselves multi-billionaires at age 27. Google was an immediate favorite with
individual shareholders -- as opposed to institutional investors and mutual
funds -- and the stock price has soared. All three top executives -- Larry
Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt -- have reduced their annual salaries to a
dollar a year and refused bonuses, tying their personal wealth directly to the
company's performance in the stock market.
In addition to its in-house
product development, Google has also grown through strategic acquisitions of
hardware and software companies with innovative video, teleconferencing and
social networking products. One of the most dramatic of these was the 2006
purchase of the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. Prior to the sale,
YouTube's earnings were negligible, but Google quickly turned it into a profit
center.
Today, Google is the Internet's
most visited Web site, employing more than a million servers around the world
to process over a billion search requests every day, accessing an index of
trillions of Web pages. There are advertising and engineering offices in New
York City, and satellite offices in Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Austin, Boulder, San
Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon
University in Pittsburgh.
In 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped
aside as CEO of Google, and Larry Page, now 38 years old, took the helm of the
company he founded 13 years before. Schmidt remains with the company as
Executive Chairman. As Google's new CEO, Larry Page plans to make Google
"a big company that has the nimbleness and soul and passion of a
start-up."
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| Lawrence Larry Page |
By: American Academic of Achievement
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