The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

  Both the audacity and the complexity of Page’s project appealed to the mathematical mind of Sergey Brin, who had been searching for a dissertation topic. He was thrilled to join forces with his friend: “This was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”148

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  BackRub was still, at that point, intended to be a compilation of backlinks on the Web that would serve as the basis for a possible annotation system and citation analysis. “Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine,” Page admitted. “The idea wasn’t even on the radar.” As the project evolved, he and Brin conjured up more sophisticated ways to assess the value of each page, based on the number and quality of links coming into it. That’s when it dawned on the BackRub Boys that their index of pages ranked by importance could become the foundation for a high-quality search engine. Thus was Google born. “When a really great dream shows up,” Page later said, “grab it!”149

  At first the revised project was called PageRank, because it ranked each page captured in the BackRub index and, not incidentally, played to Page’s wry humor and touch of vanity. “Yeah, I was referring to myself, unfortunately,” he later sheepishly admitted. “I feel kind of bad about it.”150

  That page-ranking goal led to yet another layer of complexity. Instead of just tabulating the number of links that pointed to a page, Page and Brin realized that it would be even better if they could also assign a value to each of those incoming links. For example, an incoming link from the New York Times should count for more than a link from Justin Hall’s dorm room at Swarthmore. That set up a recursive process with multiple feedback loops: each page was ranked by the number and quality of links coming into it, and the quality of these links was determined by the number and quality of links to the pages that originated them, and so on. “It’s all recursive,” Page explained. “It’s all a big circle. But mathematics is great. You can solve this.”151

  This was the type of mathematical complexity that Brin could truly appreciate. “We actually developed a lot of math to solve that problem,” he recalled. “We converted the entire web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the web pages.”152 In a paper they coauthored with their two academic advisors, they spelled out the complex math formulas based on how many incoming links a page had and the relative rank of each of these links. Then they put it in simple words for the layperson: “A page has a high rank if the sum of the ranks of its backlinks is high. This covers both the case when a page has many backlinks and when a page has a few highly ranked backlinks.”153

  The billion-dollar question was whether PageRank would actually produce better search results. So they did a comparison test. One example they used was searching university. In AltaVista and other engines, that would turn up a list of random pages that might happen to use that word in their title. “I remember asking them, ‘Why are you giving people garbage?’ ” Page said. The answer he got was that the poor results were his fault, that he should refine his search query. “I had learned from my human-computer interaction course that blaming the user is not a good strategy, so I knew they fundamentally weren’t doing the right thing. That insight, the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that was better.”154 With PageRank, the top results for a search on university were Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Michigan, which pleased them immensely. “Wow,” Page recalled saying to himself. “It was pretty clear to me and the rest of the group that if you have a way of ranking things based not just on the page itself but based on what the world thought of that page, that would be a really valuable thing for search.”155

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  Page and Brin proceeded to refine PageRank by adding more factors, such as the frequency, type size, and location of keywords on a Web page. Extra points were added if the keyword was in the URL or was capitalized or was in the title. They would look at each set of results, then tweak and refine the formula. They discovered that it was important to give a lot of weight to the anchor text, the words that were underlined as a hyperlink. For example, the words Bill Clinton were the anchor text for many links leading to whitehouse.gov, so that Web page went to the top when a user searched Bill Clinton, even though the whitehouse.gov site did not have Bill Clinton’s name prominently on its home page. One competitor, by contrast, had “Bill Clinton Joke of the Day” as its number-one result when a user searched Bill Clinton.156

  Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. So Page snapped it up. “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. “But googol was taken, anyway. There was this guy who’d already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.”157 It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.IX

  Page and Brin pushed to make Google better in two ways. First, they deployed far more bandwidth, processing power, and storage capacity to the task than any rival, revving up their Web crawler so that it was indexing a hundred pages per second. In addition, they were fanatic in studying user behavior so that they could constantly tweak their algorithms. If users clicked on the top result and then didn’t return to the results list, it meant they had gotten what they wanted. But if they did a search and returned right away to revise their query, it meant that they were dissatisfied and the engineers should learn, by looking at the refined search query, what they had been seeking in the first place. Anytime users scrolled to the second or third page of the search results, it was a sign that they were unhappy with the order of results they received. As the journalist Steven Levy pointed out, this feedback loop helped Google learn that when users typed in dogs they also were looking for puppies, and when they typed in boiling they might also be referring to hot water, and eventually Google also learned that when they typed in hot dog they were not looking for boiling puppies.158

  One other person came up with a link-based scheme very similar to PageRank: a Chinese engineer named Yanhong (Robin) Li, who studied at SUNY Buffalo and then joined a division of Dow Jones based in New Jersey. In the spring of 1996, just as Page and Brin were creating PageRank, Li came up with an algorithm he dubbed RankDex that determined the value of search results by the number of inbound links to a page and the content of the text that anchored those links. He bought a self-help book on how to patent the idea, and then did so with the help of Dow Jones. But the company did not pursue the idea, so Li moved west to work for Infoseek and then back to China. There he cofounded Baidu, which became that country’s largest search engine and one of Google’s most powerful global competitors.

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  By early 1998 Page and Brin’s database contained maps of close to 518 million hyperlinks, out of approximately 3 billion by then on the Web. Page was eager that Google not remain just an academic project but would also become a popular product. “It was like Nikola Tesla’s problem,” he said. “You make an invention you think is great, and so you want it to be used by many people as soon as possible.”159

  The desire to turn their dissertation topic into a business made Page and Brin reluctant to publish or give formal presentations on what they had done. But their academic advisors kept pushing them to publish something, so in the spring of 1998 they produced a twenty-page paper that managed to explain the academic theories behind PageRank and Google without opening their kimono so wide that it revealed too many secrets to competitors. Titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” it was delivered at a conference in Australia in April 1998.

  “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which ma
kes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext,” they began.160 By mapping more than a half billion of the Web’s 3 billion links, they were able to calculate a PageRank for at least 25 million Web pages, which “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance.” They detailed the “simple iterative algorithm” that produced PageRanks for every page. “Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally.”

  The paper included many technical details about ranking, crawling, indexing, and iterating the algorithms. There were also a few paragraphs about useful directions for future research. But by the end, it was clear this was not an academic exercise or purely scholarly pursuit. They were engaged in what would clearly become a commercial enterprise. “Google is designed to be a scalable search engine,” they declared in conclusion. “The primary goal is to provide high quality search results.”

  This may have been a problem at universities where research was supposed to be pursued primarily for scholarly purposes, not commercial applications. But Stanford not only permitted students to work on commercial endeavors, it encouraged and facilitated it. There was even an office to assist with the patenting process and licensing arrangements. “We have an environment at Stanford that promotes entrepreneurship and risk-taking research,” President John Hennessy declared. “People really understand here that sometimes the biggest way to deliver an effect to the world is not by writing a paper but by taking technology you believe in and making something of it.”161

  Page and Brin began by trying to license their software to other companies, and they met with the CEOs of Yahoo!, Excite, and AltaVista. They asked for a $1 million fee, which was not exorbitant since it would include the rights to their patents as well as the personal services of the two of them. “Those companies were worth hundreds of millions or more at the time,” Page later said. “It wasn’t that significant of an expense to them. But it was a lack of insight at the leadership level. A lot of them told us, ‘Search is not that important.’ ”162

  As a result, Page and Brin decided to start a company of their own. It helped that within a few miles of the campus there were successful entrepreneurs to act as angel investors, as well as eager venture capitalists just up Sand Hill Road to provide working capital. David Cheriton, one of their professors at Stanford, had founded an Ethernet product company with one such investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, which they had sold to Cisco Systems. In August 1998 Cheriton suggested to Page and Brin that they meet with Bechtolsheim, who had also cofounded Sun Microsystems. Late one night, Brin sent him an email. He got an instant reply, and early the next morning they all met on Cheriton’s Palo Alto porch.

  Even at that unholy hour for students, Page and Brin were able to give a compelling demo of their search engine, showing that they could download, index, and page-rank much of the Web on racks of minicomputers. It was a comfortable meeting at the height of the dotcom boom, and Bechtolsheim’s questions were encouraging. Unlike the scores of pitches that came to him each week, this was not a PowerPoint presentation of some vaporware that didn’t yet exist. He could actually type in queries, and answers popped up instantly that were far better than what AltaVista produced. Plus the two founders were whip smart and intense, the type of entrepreneurs he liked to bet on. Bechtolsheim appreciated that they were not throwing large amounts of money—or any money, for that matter—at marketing. They knew that Google was good enough to spread by word of mouth, so every penny they had went to components for the computers they were assembling themselves. “Other Web sites took a good chunk of venture funding and spent it on advertising,” Bechtolsheim said. “This was the opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.”163

  Even though Brin and Page were averse to accepting advertising, Bechtolsheim knew that it would be simple—and not corrupting—to put clearly labeled display ads on the search results page. That meant there was an obvious revenue stream waiting to be tapped. “This is the single best idea I have heard in years,” he told them. They talked about valuation for a minute, and Bechtolsheim said they were setting their price too low. “Well, I don’t want to waste time,” he concluded, since he had to get to work. “I’m sure it’ll help you guys if I just write a check.” He went to the car to get his checkbook and wrote one made out to Google Inc. for $100,000. “We don’t have a bank account yet,” Brin told him. “Deposit it when you get one,” Bechtolsheim replied. Then he rode off in his Porsche.

  Brin and Page went to Burger King to celebrate. “We thought we should get something that tasted really good, though it was really unhealthy,” Page said. “And it was cheap. It seemed like the right combination of ways to celebrate the funding.”164

  Bechtolsheim’s check made out to Google Inc. provided a spur to get themselves incorporated. “We had to quickly get a lawyer,” Brin said.165 Page recalled, “It was like, wow, maybe we really should start a company now.”166 Because of Bechtolsheim’s reputation—and because of the impressive nature of Google’s product—other funders came in, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos declared. “They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.”167 The favorable buzz around Google grew so loud that, a few months later, it was able to pull off the rare feat of getting investments from both of the valley’s rival top venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

  Silicon Valley had one other ingredient, in addition to a helpful university and eager mentors and venture capitalists: a lot of garages, like the ones in which Hewlett and Packard designed their first products and Jobs and Wozniak assembled the first Apple I boards. When Page and Brin realized that it was time to put aside plans for dissertations and leave the Stanford nest, they found a garage—a two-car garage, which came with a hot tub and a couple of spare rooms inside the house—that they could rent for $1,700 a month at the Menlo Park house of a Stanford friend, Susan Wojcicki, who soon joined Google. In September 1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up a whiteboard emblazoned “Google Worldwide Headquarters.”

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  In addition to making all of the World Wide Web’s information accessible, Google represented a climactic leap in the relationship between humans and machines—the “man-computer symbiosis” that Licklider had envisioned four decades earlier. Yahoo! had attempted a more primitive version of this symbiosis by using both electronic searches and human-compiled directories. The approach that Page and Brin took might appear, at first glance, to be a way of removing human hands from this formula by having the searches performed by Web crawlers and computer algorithms only. But a deeper look reveals that their approach was in fact a melding of machine and human intelligence. Their algorithm relied on the billions of human judgments made by people when they created links from their own websites. It was an automated way to tap into the wisdom of humans—in other words, a higher form of human-computer symbiosis. “The process might seem completely automated,” Brin explained, “but in terms of how much human input goes into the final product, there are millions of people who spend time designing their webpages, determining who to link to and how, and that human element goes into it.”168

  In his seminal 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush had set forth the challenge: “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.” In the paper they submitted to Stanford just before they left to launch their company, Brin and Page made the same point: “The number of documents in the indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude, but the user’
s ability to look at documents has not.” Their words were less eloquent than Bush’s, but they had succeeded in fulfilling his dream of a human-machine collaboration to deal with information overload. In doing so, Google became the culmination of a sixty-year process to create a world in which humans, computers, and networks were intimately linked. Anyone could share with people anywhere and, as the Victorian-era almanac promised, enquire within upon everything.

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  I. Like the Web’s HTTP, Gopher was an Internet (TCP/IP) application layer protocol. It primarily facilitated a menu-based navigation for finding and distributing documents (usually text-based) online. The links were done by the servers rather than embedded in the documents. It was named after the university’s mascot and was also a pun on “go for.”

  II. A year later, Andreessen would join with the serially successful entrepreneur Jim Clark to launch a company called Netscape that produced a commercial version of the Mosaic browser.

  III. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies incorporate mathematically coded encryption techniques and other principles of cryptography to create a secure currency that is not centrally controlled.

  IV. In March 2003 blog as both a noun and a verb was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary.

  V. Tellingly, and laudably, Wikipedia’s entries on its own history and the roles of Wales and Sanger have turned out, after much fighting on the discussion boards, to be balanced and objective.