**I misspoke at 5:33, meant to say 1998.

One could argue that Larry Page was destined to impact the world in a big way.
The son of Carl and Gloria Page, who had a Ph.D. and Masters in Computer Science respectively, Larry grew up in a scholarly environment that accelerated his development.
While kids in the late 70s were reading comics and playing with Star Wars action figures, Page was reading technical magazines and working with computers that his parents would bring home.
By age seven, he was adept at the Exidy Sorcerer computer, using it for his elementary school homework, turning in print outs from the computer’s word processor, incredibly unusual in 1980.
At 12, he studied Nikola Tesla’s biography with fascination.
He came to the conclusion that he would have a better chance of changing the world with his inventions by starting his own company.
Ten years later, in 1995, Page’s plan would begin when he awoke from a dream with a vision to download the World Wide Web.

At this point in time, the Web was just five years old, but it was growing exponentially with less than 24,000 websites in 1995 and more than doubling every year after that.
This was well before broadband, and the internet experience would be unusable in today’s standards.
And search engines at the time were clunky and did not produce good results creating a painful experience.
Users would often have to sift through four pages of links to find a relevant website.
Outside of battling unwanted spam and adult sites, the search industry’s interest in improving search engines was minimal.
And this brings us back to Page’s vision.
His idea was to download the Web, also known as web crawling or web indexing, which in and of itself was not new.
However, Page wanted to index the Web differently by focusing on the backlink structure of the Web.
Backlinks are simply links from one website to another.
He realized that websites with more backlinks pointing to it were naturally more reputable than sites with less.
This would make search results more accurate compared to existing methods, which simply ranked websites based on how many times the search term appeared on pages.
Achieving this would require developing a sophisticated algorithm and a tremendous amount of computing power.
To help with this endeavor, Page turned to his friend at Stanford, Sergey Brin.
Brin was already working on a similar project at the time, which involved data mining the Web.
He was just as brilliant Page and also came from a lineage of scientists tracing back to his great grandmother who studied microbiology.
His grandfather was a Math professor, and both parents were mathematicians.

By March 1996, Page and Brin began crawling the Web using a URL server and up to four web crawling systems.
This system was able to retrieve over 100 web pages per second at peak performance.
They also began working on their search engine, which was written in Java and Python.
Their work resulted in the now-famous PageRank algorithm that ranks search results based on backlink reputation.
Their friends Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg were recruited to help with the project and proved to be instrumental in its development.
Page’s web crawler demanded more and more of Stanford’s resources, and Page and Brin were continually harassing the computer science department for more resources.
They even went as far as one day sneaking onto the computer science department loading dock and taking some computers that were being delivered.

By August, Page’s crawler indexed 75 million pages amounting to 207 GB of content.

They release the first version of the search engine on the Stanford website, taking up almost have of the university’s bandwidth.
The engine was called Backrub, and Page and Brin did what they could to keep it a secret so that their idea would not be stolen.
Page and Brin found themselves at a crossroad, should they turn Backrub into a business or complete their PhDs.
They turned to Stanford Professor Jeffery Ullman for help who introduced them to angel investor Ram Shriram who was well connected in the tech industry.
Shriram was impressed with Backrub but didn’t think there was room in the market for another one.
He recommended selling their technology to an established company.
It’s safe to assume that no one knew the full extent of the engine’s potential, not even Page and Brin.
With completing PhDs in the back of their minds, they set out to sell their engine.
They met with a handful of companies, including Excite and Yahoo, two of the biggest brands in search of the time.
Excite was very close to buying the search engine for a mere one million dollars, but Excite CEO George Bell backed out of the deal, ultimately leading to one of the biggest blunders in history.
Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang was very impressed with the search engine but weird as it sounds; it worked too good.