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POWER IN WEB TECHNOLOGY: Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Co-Founders of Google
By: Ed Stephon

Headquartered in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Google has made co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page into multibillionaires and is the world’s most comprehensive search engine.  Launched in 1998, Google has altered the world of cyberspace and shaped the information superhighway.  Currently, approximately 70% of all U.S. searches take place through Google.    Indeed, the word “Google” has become a verb, just like “Xerox” before it.  

While these two high-tech entrepreneurs are both self-made and share the 26th rank in the Forbes’ List of the World’s Billionaires for 2009, their personalities and backgrounds are quite different.  In fact, Brin and Page were less than enthusiastic about each other at their first meeting while they were doctoral students at Stanford University.  Nevertheless, they decided in 1996 to collaborate on a research project on Internet information retrieval, and the seeds of Google were planted.  Two years later, Brin and Page dropped out of Stanford to start Google from a friend’s garage.

The initial, tremendous impact of Google was due to its ability to vastly improve the quality of information accessed from the Internet.  It accomplished this through a webpage ranking system which determined relevance based on popularity as opposed to repetition of terms.  Essentially, a Google search ranked quality over quantity by showing the most retrieved sites first.  It was a revolutionary concept, and the popularity of the company skyrocketed.  By 2003, Google was the most powerful Internet business in the world.  In 2008, Page stated in hindsight, “Breakthrough ideas are just around the corner, but most of us are failing to take a chance on them.”

Although currently facing fierce challenges from rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, Google continues to dominate the market through introducing new features aimed at further increasing its site traffic.  What is perhaps most notable about the Google phenomenon is its self-replicating nature.  As the company’s computational procedures organize more information, the organizational process improves.  As users get better at Googling, the company learns more about the pages being searched and its users.  According to Page, “If you solve search, you’ve solved all problems.  Our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and available to everyone.”  

Besides altering the process of information retrieval, Brin and Page have also changed the landscape of corporate philanthropy through astutely blending business acumen with beneficence through the establishment of the Google Foundation.  It was launched in 2005 with an initial endowment of $90 million and is funded through one percent of the company’s stock and one percent of its annual profits.  Specifically, the foundation operates as a for-profit entity which makes grants to nonprofits and

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