The person responsible for providing us with all the information of
the world is Larry Page; ranking on number 13 on Forbes richest people
list with a net worth of 20.3 billion dollars. He is an American
computer scientist, entrepreneur and the co-founder of Google.
Larry Page was born on 26th March 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan.
Both his parents were experts in computers and following his parents
line of interest, Page graduated from the University of Michigan with
Bachelor of Science in computer engineering and Master of Science from
Stanford University. He was interested in computers from an early age
and he wanted to start his own company from age 12. He was the first
child in his school to do an assignment on word processor. It was during
his time in Stanford when the first seeds of this brilliant thought
were planted.
After he entered the PhD program, he had to decide on a dissertation
theme. This was when he came up with the idea that would link together
web pages, like a citation links to a reference. He was joined with
college friend and fellow PhD student
Sergey Brin,
who found this topic to be very appealing. The project was initially
named ‘Backrub’. Both started working on this huge task of building a
crawler that would convert backlink data into a degree of how important a
web page was. Consequently, PageRank algorithm was created that made
the duo realize that they could make a search engine far greater to the
ones that were currently in use. The first version of Google came out in
1996 and it is still available on the Stanford University’s website.
Google Inc. was founded in 1998 with Larry Page and Sergey Brin as
co-presidents. Its initial domain name was ‘Googol’ which was derived
from a number that is one followed by hundred zeros. This represented
the vast amount of data that the search engine was intended to explore.
They stated their mission as ‘to organize the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful’. With a humble beginning from
Page’s garage the company expanded to own few offices in California in
1999 and then an entire complex called ‘Googleplex’, that is of the most
extraordinary workplaces of the world comprising of amazing
recreational and exercising facilities. By 2001 Google was growing with a
fiery speediness and making big profits. The company’s first public
offering was $1.67 billion which gave it a market capitalization of $23
billion. Page became a multi billionaire at just 27. As a favorite of
shareholders, Google’s stock prices rose immensely. Page received the
Academy of Achievement’s ‘Golden Plate Award’ in 2004.
By 2006, Google consisted of more than 10,000 employees with annual
incomes of over ten billion dollars. Google bought several hardware and
software companies out of which the most profitable was the purchase of
YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. Today, Google is one of the most used
website with over a million servers worldwide. It processes more than a
billion search requests every day.
Larry Page is one of the most successful entrepreneurs who laid the
foundation for a venture that has changed the way in which internet was
used.
Google.com , hollywood reporter photo...