Chapter 3. In the Beginning
From the time they met in 1996 until 1998, Larry and Sergey continued to experiment with various search ideas. Larry began studying the importance of links with his own homepage on the Stanford website. With the search engine he named BackRub, he wrote and improved on search code based on links between websites.
Page and Brin soon latched onto two big ideas. The first was based on BackRub but was renamed "Page-Rank" after Larry Page. PageRank treated the number of times a site was linked to others as a rough measure of its authority. The second was to automate and sanctify the search process and to cope with the ever-increasing number of sites. In order to give some objectivity to the results, humans could work with the algorithm, but never tinker with the search results. (This still is mostly true. However, with the introduction of Google's SearchWiki, searchers themselves can tailor the results in various ways.)
Once Larry and Sergey had defined the new way to search and deliver the results, they were faced with two more major problems: how to collect the entire World Wide Web into one database and how to find enough computer power to store and process the huge volumes of information.
The pair scrounged around to collect computers for the project, often haunting the Stanford loading docks for machinery to borrow. The first version of Google was released in August 1996, on the Stanford Web. The address was google.stanford.edu.
Very quickly Stanford grew weary of the burden the two grad students were placing on its system. They in turn outgrew Stanford's capacity to provide equipment and to handle the burgeoning number of search requests coming in. A little over a year later, Sergey and Larry took the search engine off Stanford servers because Google took up too much bandwidth. In 1997, Google.com was registered as a domain name.
The need for physical equipment continued to explode. Without initial resources, Larry and Sergey found computers and equipment wherever they could. They cobbled together inexpensive PCs to hold their data. They got a good deal on a terabyte of disks and built their own computer housings in Larry's dorm room. The dorm room became their first data center. "Larry would scour the world to save a penny," recalled Charles Orgish, Stanford's head of computer systems.[]
What started as a necessity soon became one of Google's competitive advantages. They found that their jerry-rigged computer system was easy to repair and modify. "Others assumed large servers were the fastest way to handle massive amounts of data. Google found networked PCs to be faster," explained Google on its Corporation Information Web page.
Venture capitalist and Google board member John Doerr says that Google uses "pile-up" computing. It piles up a bunch of computers, connects them, and builds a data center. The way the machines are set up, when one breaks down the entire system does not break down. The crippled machine is ignored and the work of processing queries continues.
By mid-1998, Sergey set up a business office, and the pair began contacting potential partners who might want to license a superior search engine.
They hoped to sell Google through the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. They shopped the company around at $1 million. Alta Vista, Excite, and the now-defunct Infoseek were among the companies that saw no commercial benefit to Google. No doubt to their everlasting regret, these companies passed. Larry and Sergey had no luck finding a buyer.
The young entrepreneurs faced a daunting problem. While they were passionate about their project, at that time few others in the computer industry saw Internet search as an important aspect of their work.
However, when Larry and Sergey called on David Filo, one of the founders of Yahoo!, he recognized the value of their technology but encouraged them to go forward with forming their own company the way he and Jerry Yang had done. "When it's fully developed and scalable," Filo said, "let's talk again."[]
It wasn't the answer they were hoping for, but it gave them encouragement. And Filo did point them in the right direction. The disappointment in not being able to sell their work may have been the greatest stroke of luck in their lives so far.
"That people were concentrating on other things was crucial," recalls Craig Silverstein, the college friend who was the first to join Page and Brin as an employee. "It's very possible that if someone had been truly interested in our technology, we would have just sold to them."
"We recognized that a lot of companies don't make it," added Silverstein, now Google's director of technology. "The venture capitalists tried to scare us, saying that 80 percent of start-ups fail. Larry shot back with: 'Yes, but most of those are restaurants.'"[]
Going it alone was a risk, but Larry's self-confidence showed up early in the Google game. His advisor, Terry Winograd, felt the students had a viable product but knew they needed to move off campus and begin acting like a real company. That took money that Sergey and Larry didn't yet have. "I don't see how you're ever going to get the money," lamented Winograd. Larry replied, "Well, you're going to see. We'll figure that out."[]
Ruth Kedar, who designed the Google logo, said she felt the Google guys came to her with vision, direction, and optimism. "In general," said Kedar, "when people speak about their big dreams in life, they apologize many times for it, for the pretension. They (Brin and Page) weren't like that. It was clear to them from the start that they had something big on their hands."[]
Google's corporate page noted that despite the quivery beginning, Google was on its way by the late 1990s. "Clearly we evolved," says the Google website. "What had been a college research project was now a real company offering a service that was in great demand. So on September 21, 1999, the beta label came off Google.com."