Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who broke new ground with their internet search engine, are about to test their strategy on Wall Street.
The two are effectively billionaires based on Google’s market value and and could become even more wealthy with the launch of Google’s estimated $2,7-billion initial public offering (IPO).
But they say the dot-com crash at the end of the 1990s taught them that their fortunes depend on the click of a computer mouse.
Brin, who was born in Moscow, and Page, the son of a Michigan State University computer science professor, met in 1995 while studying for PhDs at Stanford University in California.
Their launch of Google prevented both from finishing their doctorates. They say they are on an extended leave of absence.
Their breakthrough came in a paper with the catchy title: Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.
In it, they explained the complex mathematics they used to index and rank websites in order of how often they were linked — and to show search results in that order.
After tests on a second hand computer, the search engine was launched from a base in Page’s student bedroom. The two quit school and Google was launched in September 1998 with about one million dollars the pair managed to raise.
Google went on line with a simple recipe.
It had just a logo and a search engine while rivals such as Yahoo were packing their homepages with sports scores, weather forecasts and news headlines.
Page said the aim was for people to spend as little time as possible on Google so that they would come back more often.
Now Google has indexed more than four billion internet pages and powers 200-million searches every day. To ”google” has become a verb for a search on the internet.
Brin and Page, both unmarried, have been estimated by Fortune Magazine to be worth one billion dollars apiece. Their initial public offering could vastly increase that.
The two insist however that they are very conscious of the power of Google compared to other technologies.
”People really care about their information — it’s their career, it’s their health, it’s their education, so the impact of Google on the world psyche is much greater,” Brin told one forum last year.
But he said that ”people tend to exaggerate Google’s significance”.
”Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine. People come to Google because they choose to. We don’t trick them.” – Sapa-AFP