The Google Guys by Richard L. Brandt Read Free Book Online Page A

is also a clever hardware engineer. He needed disk drives to store the data he collected, but had very little money, so he bought the cheapest drives he could find. But when he tried them out, they weren’t fast enough. Instead of throwing them out, he figured out a way to make them work anyway, by doubling the number of terminals on the drive connections. “I had never thought of doing that,” says Ullman. “This was engineering of the first order.”
    Their separate projects brought Larry and Sergey together in late 1995. “I was chatting with Larry a lot,” recalls Sergey. “He and I got along pretty well.” 3 If Larry wanted to search the Web, he also needed a crawler. So he recruited Sergey to the Digital Libraries project, combining his search technology with Sergey’s Web crawler.
    They made a great combination. “Sergey likes math things,” says Stanford professor Andreas Paepcke, who headed the Digital Libraries project. “Larry just wanted to build. It just kind of grew.”
    Scott Hassan, another Stanford grad student who worked with Larry and Sergey, recalls that it was mainly Larry’s project. “For Larry, it was his primary thing. Sergey was just doing it because it was interesting to him.” They generally worked late into the night on indexing and parsing Web pages at a Fresh Choice restaurant in Palo Alto, which offered a “Student’s Special” buffet for five dollars. They often toiled until 5:00 A.M.

There Will Never Be Another Yahoo
    At Stanford, Larry and Sergey’s search engine could analyze thirty to fifty pages a second. Two years later, that rose to about a thousand a second. Today, it’s millions. It took a lot of research and programming to make it work. “We developed a lot of math to solve that problem,” Sergey told an interviewer in 2000. “We convert the entire Web into a big equation with several hundred million variables.” 4
    They played around with different names for their search engine. One of them was the “What Box.” “But then we decided that sounded like wet box, which sounded like some kind of porn site,” Sergey recalled. 5 Looking for a big number, they intended to call the crawler Googol—a word coined by the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner for the number 10 100 . Kasner simply wanted to name the biggest number anyone had ever given a name. He then also coined another name, the Googolplex, which is ten to the power of googol. (Larry and Sergey later adopted the name GooglePlex for their corporate campus.)
    Nobody thought this would be the basis of a new company. Most people thought that Yahoo had already won the search engine wars, although Yahoo was really a classification system akin to the Dewey decimal system (without the decimals). It was a portal and did not even have its own search engine, licensing one from Akamai instead. The other search company executives didn’t think that search technology could or needed to be improved. Larry knew differently. If the Internet was to reach its potential, it needed new inventions to make it easier to find the right stuff. Without Google, the Internet might still be in the pre-Hellenistic Age. Nevertheless, Lent says, “In early 1996, we all said, ‘There will never be another Yahoo.’ ”
    Just because this was an academic exercise, it didn’t mean Larry wasn’t ambitious. In order to build a system to test their theory, he and Sergey were repeatedly borrowing money from other students and faculty, and “borrowing” equipment that arrived at the loading dock at Gates Hall before its owners could claim it. “We had stolen all these computers from all over the [computer science] department,” recalled Sergey. 6 Finally, Professor Garcia-Molina asked Larry exactly how much of the Internet he wanted to search. Larry’s response: “All of it.”