Larry Page

Lawrence "Larry" Page born on March 26, 1973 in Lansing, Michigan to parents Carl Vincent Page, who is a professor of computer science at Michigan University and Gloria Page, who is a computer programming teacher at Michigan University. With his parents guidance from the beginning Page was destined to be successful in the IT industry in one way or another. He is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google Inc. with Sergey Brin, and will be the future CEO of the proposed conglomerate, Alphabet Inc. Page is the inventor of PageRank, Google's best-known search ranking algorithm. As of November 2014, Google has 55,600 employees and operates in more than 40 countries. Page is a board member of the X Prize Foundation and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. Page received the Marconi Prize in 2004.

After graduating from East Lansing High School he studied for a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and went on to study a Masters degree at Stanford University. While studying at Stanford University, Page was introduced to Sergey Brin. The two did not start out as friends, seeming to disagree on most topics of conversation, but eventually came across a subject that had been a great interest to them both. That topic was Retrieving information from large data sets. Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks as valuable

information for that page the role of citations in academic publishing would also become pertinent for the research. Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, would soon join Page's research project, nicknamed "BackRub." Together, the pair authored a research paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". which became one of the most downloaded scientific documents in the history of the internet at the time.At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler. The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating.

Page and Brin used the former's basic HTML programming skills to set up a simple search page for users, as they did not have a web page developer to create anything visually elaborate. They also began using any computer part they could find to assemble the necessary computing power to handle searches by multiple users. As their search engine grew in popularity among Stanford users, it required additional Servers to process the queries. In August 1996, the initial version of Google, still on the Stanford University website, was made available to Internet users.

By early 1997, the BackRub page described the state as follows

Some Rough Statistics from August 29, 1996

Total indexable HTML urls: 75.2306 Million

Total content downloaded: 207.022 gigabytes

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra series II with 28GB of disk. Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg have provided a great deal of very talented implementation help. Sergey Brin has also been very involved and deserves many thanks.

 

Soon after they started working on a project that later became the Google search engine. After trying to sell the idea failed, they wrote up a business plan and brought in a total initial investment of almost $1 million to start their own company. In September 1998 Google Inc. opened in Menlo Park, California  with the initial domain name of "Googol" derived from a number that consists of one followed by one hundred zeros this represented the vast amount of data that the search engine was intended to explore.

The company grew so quickly and gained so many employees’ a few office relocations were made due to lack of space, with Google Inc finally settled in its current place at Mountain View, California. Over the next few years headed by Larry and Sergey Google made many innovations and added to its list of products and employee’s nearly 5000 by 2006. By October 2004 Google announced their first quarterly results as a public offered company, with record revenues of $805.9 million. As of 2015 Page has been estimated to be worth US$29.2 billion USD and is sixteenth in Forbes 400 list and making him the 27th richest person in the world. 

In 2002, Larry was named a "World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow". He is a member of the "National Advisory Committee" NAC for the University of Michigan College of Engineering, and together with Co-Founder Sergey Brin, Larry was honored with the Marconi Prize in 2004. He is a trustee on the board of the X PRIZE, and was elected to the "National Academy of Engineering" in 2004.