Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the billionaire founders of Google, Inc. Sergey Brin's net worth is $18.7 billion USD, making him the 34th-richest person in the world, and Larry Page's net worth is $18.6 billion USD, making his the 35th.
Sergey Brin seemed destined to become an engineering prodigy. He was born August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Soviet Union. He is the son of two mathematicians who graduated from Moscow State University, Michael and Evgenia Brin. The family emigrated to the United States and Sergey attended a Montessori gifted-student school in Adelphi, Maryland, and received further tutoring at home from his father, who had become a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland by this time. Sergey Brin went on to the University of Maryland, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May of 1993. He then went on to graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University, where he earned his master's degree.
Larry Page likewise has a background surprisingly well-suited for a technology prodigy. He was born March 26, 1973, in Lansing, Michigan, and the son of Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. He, too, attended a Montessori gifted-student school in Lansing, Michigan. He went on to the University of Michigan to pick up a Bachelor of Science degree and Stanford University to obtain a Masters degree in Computer Science.
The two met at Stanford University, and both of them had already shown signs of exceptional talent. Sergey Brin had already written a software program to work with the TeX formatting markup language, co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction, and started a website for film ratings. Larry Page had already written his dissertation on exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, served as president of the electrical and computer engineering honor society known as "Eta Kappa Nu"(HKN), and, as a stunt, built an inkjet printer out of Lego bricks.
Looking at that background, how could they have helped but create Google? In 1995, the two sat down together to write a paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.", and worked together to create the PageRank algorithm used today to index web content. The first incarnation of Google went online on Stanford University's web site in 1996. Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. in 1998.
To understand why they were such a smashing success, it is necessary to understand what the World Wide Web was in 1998. The leading search engines of the time were AskJeeves.com, now known as "Ask.com", and Lycos.com. Lycos was devoted to finding goods to purchase online, nothing more. AskJeeves was also sort of directed towards this, but would occasionally produce informative content and was built to try to use natural language searches phrased as a question. Altavista.com and Yahoo.com were both also making entries into the search market, but both of them were lacking as well. It is not enough to search a web page for words the way you'd search a text file on your desktop; you need some kind of authority to designate that the web page is actually about that topic and not just a dictionary file posted to a spam site. It was this innovation that Google brought to the web.
Today, "google" is actually recognized as a verb meaning "to search the web for information" according to several dictionaries. Google, headquartered today in Mountain View, California, has grown to be the most essential web service known, with revenues of $16.6 billion USD annually. The company has kept a squeaky-clean image with their official corporate motto being "Don't be evil." This is reflected in their enthusiastic support of Free and Open Source software, their embracing of cross-platform technology, their use and advocacy of the Linux operating system and GNU software, their "Summer of Code" events, and their bountiful offerings of free services on the Internet which makes access to information an equal opportunity for everyone.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin have earned their success many times over. They have striven against the closed, secretive nature of proprietary technology companies by being refreshingly open and pro-education. The Google office headquarters and Google development labs are the Shangri-La of the IT professional culture, the place where anybody in technology would love to work. The full path of Google, Inc. has yet to be charted, but it has so far grown every year without fail and shows no signs of abating.