It Adds Up

Larry did …

Larry’s mother and father were both computer science professors. From an early age, Larry knew he wanted to invent things and by the time he was 12, he had already decided that he was going to start his own company one day.

Larry was getting his PHD in Computer Science at Stanford University when he started thinking about the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. He tried plotting it on a huge graph. Encouraged by his teachers, Larry and his friend Sergey started researching the problem of finding out which web pages linked to a given page.

Larry came up with an idea. The millions of links between documents on the Web were really citations – like references in a book. At the time, existing search engines ranked Web pages by how many times the search term appeared on the page. Larry’s idea was that the pages with the most links to them must be the most relevant.

So Larry and Sergey put their ideas into practice and created their own search engine which they named after an little known mathematical term.

Today, the search engine Larry and Sergey created is at the heart of a $38 billion worldwide business and has even become an action verb … Google

Google is a great idea because searching out the right way to do things instead of just doing what everybody else does can lead to phenomenal success.