Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. So Page snapped it up. “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. “But googol was taken, anyway. There was this guy who’d already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.”157 It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.IX
Page and Brin pushed to make Google better in two ways. First, they deployed far more bandwidth, processing power, and storage capacity to the task than any rival, revving up their Web crawler so that it was indexing a hundred pages per second. In addition, they were fanatic in studying user behavior so that they could constantly tweak their algorithms. If users clicked on the top result and then didn’t return to the results list, it meant they had gotten what they wanted. But if they did a search and returned right away to revise their query, it meant that they were dissatisfied and the engineers should learn, by looking at the refined search query, what they had been seeking in the first place. Anytime users scrolled to the second or third page of the search results, it was a sign that they were unhappy with the order of results they received. As the journalist Steven Levy pointed out, this feedback loop helped Google learn that when users typed in dogs they also were looking for puppies, and when they typed in boiling they might also be referring to hot water, and eventually Google also learned that when they typed in hot dog they were not looking for boiling puppies.158
One other person came up with a link-based scheme very similar to PageRank: a Chinese engineer named Yanhong (Robin) Li, who studied at SUNY Buffalo and then joined a division of Dow Jones based in New Jersey. In the spring of 1996, just as Page and Brin were creating PageRank, Li came up with an algorithm he dubbed RankDex that determined the value of search results by the number of inbound links to a page and the content of the text that anchored those links. He bought a self-help book on how to patent the idea, and then did so with the help of Dow Jones. But the company did not pursue the idea, so Li moved west to work for Infoseek and then back to China. There he cofounded Baidu, which became that country’s largest search engine and one of Google’s most powerful global competitors.
By early 1998 Page and Brin’s database contained maps of close to 518 million hyperlinks, out of approximately 3 billion by then on the Web. Page was eager that Google not remain just an academic project but would also become a popular product. “It was like Nikola Tesla’s problem,” he said. “You make an invention you think is great, and so you want it to be used by many people as soon as possible.”159
The desire to turn their dissertation topic into a business made Page and Brin reluctant to publish or give formal presentations on what they had done. But their academic advisors kept pushing them to publish something, so in the spring of 1998 they produced a twenty-page paper that managed to explain the academic theories behind PageRank and Google without opening their kimono so wide that it revealed too many secrets to competitors. Titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” it was delivered at a conference in Australia in April 1998.
“In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext,” they began.160 By mapping more than a half billion of the Web’s 3 billion links, they were able to calculate a PageRank for at least 25 million Web pages, which “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance.” They detailed the “simple iterative algorithm” that produced PageRanks for every page. “Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally.”
The paper included many technical details about ranking, crawling, indexing, and iterating the algorithms. There were also a few paragraphs about useful directions for future research. But by the end, it was clear this was not an academic exercise or purely scholarly pursuit. They were engaged in what would clearly become a commercial enterprise. “Google is designed to be a scalable search engine,” they declared in conclusion. “The primary goal is to provide high quality search results.”
This may have been a problem at universities where research was supposed to be pursued primarily for scholarly purposes, not commercial applications. But Stanford not only permitted students to work on commercial endeavors, it encouraged and facilitated it. There was even an office to assist with the patenting process and licensing arrangements. “We have an environment at Stanford that promotes entrepreneurship and risk-taking research,” President John Hennessy declared. “People really understand here that sometimes the biggest way to deliver an effect to the world is not by writing a paper but by taking technology you believe in and making something of it.”161
Page and Brin began by trying to license their software to other companies, and they met with the CEOs of Yahoo!, Excite, and AltaVista. They asked for a $1 million fee, which was not exorbitant since it would include the rights to their patents as well as the personal services of the two of them. “Those companies were worth hundreds of millions or more at the time,” Page later said. “It wasn’t that significant of an expense to them. But it was a lack of insight at the leadership level. A lot of them told us, ‘Search is not that important.’ ”162
As a result, Page and Brin decided to start a company of their own. It helped that within a few miles of the campus there were successful entrepreneurs to act as angel investors, as well as eager venture capitalists just up Sand Hill Road to provide working capital. David Cheriton, one of their professors at Stanford, had founded an Ethernet product company with one such investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, which they had sold to Cisco Systems. In August 1998 Cheriton suggested to Page and Brin that they meet with Bechtolsheim, who had also cofounded Sun Microsystems. Late one night, Brin sent him an email. He got an instant reply, and early the next morning they all met on Cheriton’s Palo Alto porch.
Even at that unholy hour for students, Page and Brin were able to give a compelling demo of their search engine, showing that they could download, index, and page-rank much of the Web on racks of minicomputers. It was a comfortable meeting at the height of the dotcom boom, and Bechtolsheim’s questions were encouraging. Unlike the scores of pitches that came to him each week, this was not a PowerPoint presentation of some vaporware that didn’t yet exist. He could actually type in queries, and answers popped up instantly that were far better than what AltaVista produced. Plus the two founders were whip smart and intense, the type of entrepreneurs he liked to bet on. Bechtolsheim appreciated that they were not throwing large amounts of money—or any money, for that matter—at marketing. They knew that Google was good enough to spread by word of mouth, so every penny they had went to components for the computers they were assembling themselves. “Other Web sites took a good chunk of venture funding and spent it on advertising,” Bechtolsheim said. “This was the opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.”163