Once, Winograd said, they snuck onto the loading dock where new Stanford computers were delivered and “borrowed” them to expand their computing power. Page and Brin brought a cart to transport the crates. Some years later, Page confessed that their embryonic search engine in 1997 hogged so much computer capacity that “we caused the whole Stanford network to go down.”
The new search engine, at first called BackRub, was an object of some secrecy. Spurred by Page’s obsession with Tesla, who unwittingly gave away his inventions by sharing them with others, Page and Brin zealously guarded the algorithms that created PageRank. But as Ph.D. candidates, they were expected to present their work, so to satisfy Stanford’s academic requirements they agreed to deliver a paper in January 1998. At the time it wasn’t clear whether they wanted to be entrepreneurs or academics. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page said. “We wanted to finish school,” as their fathers had. Page remembered the words of Stanford professor Jeffrey Ullman, who urged them to leave the university: “You guys can always come back and finish your Ph.D.’s if you don’t succeed.” This argument ultimately proved persuasive, but not before the paper was delivered.
The database they discussed consisted of 24 million Web pages; a typical search took one to ten seconds. They chose the name Google to replace BackRub because, they said, “it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.” (Actually, they wanted to name it Googol but that domain name was taken. They also thought of The Whatbox, Brin said a few years later, but “we decided that Whatbox sounded like Wetbox, which sounded like some sort of porn site.”) Their paper stated that their search technology offered “two important features that help it produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank… Second, Google utilizes” links-518 million hyperlinks at the time-to make maps that “allow rapid calculation of a web page’s ‘PageRank.’” They presented some calculations to describe how they approximated “a page’s importance or quality.”
Page and Brin’s paper was attempting to advance a belief that both their fathers had passed on to them: artificial intelligence (AI) was the next scientific frontier. The search engine would supplement the limited human brain. “Brin and Page,” Nicholas Carr would write years later, “are expressing a desire that has long been a hallmark of the mathematicians and computer scientists who have devoted themselves to the creation of artificial intelligence.” They were following the lead of René Descartes, the French philosopher/mathematician who four centuries ago argued that “the body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking,” and mathematical formulas were the preferred route to “pure understanding.”
Their paper derided search engines that had become “commercial” and “advertising oriented,” and offered an example of how “the advertising business model” did not correspond “to providing quality search to users.” Suppose, they wrote, a user did a search for cellular phones and the top result was a report on how the use of cell phones was a dangerous distraction while driving. Although this search result might be judged highly important by their PageRank algorithm, it would be likely to provoke protests from cell phone advertisers. Thus, they concluded, “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
The search system they proposed-shaped around teams of engineers who shared information, beta tested everything, and treated users, not advertisers, as kings-was in turn shaped by the Stanford and Web culture of the time. “They were,” observed Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, an author and intellectual guru to a generation of Webheads, “part of an engineering tribe that defined itself as the anti-Microsoft. What it meant to be on the other side was to develop the exact opposite intuitions. Microsoft’s approach was: ‘You’re going to live by my rules.’ The opposite is: ‘No, I’m going to build it and you’re free to use it however you want. I’m just going to empower you to do what you want.’ It’s the Unix philosophy: Give me a little pile of code and you can plug it into anything you want. That was Stanford in the nineties.” It was the Netscape philosophy too, for the same January 1998 month Page and Brin presented their paper, the company that grew out of the browser invented by Marc Andreessen announced that it was revealing the source code to its browser; the new open-source browser would later be named Mozilla.
The presentation was a hit among the “tribe,” the professors and graduate students in the audience. Page and Brin had solved a problem for Internet users, said Motwani, who thought: “This is going to change the way the Internet is used!” The word of mouth was electric. Motwani was certain Internet companies would jockey to purchase the technology, and soon after, Brin said, the two partners began speaking to various Silicon Valley companies. Yet all passed on possibly acquiring Google. Even new media companies, it appears, were slow to peer over the horizon.
IN 1998, the year Google was incorporated, utopianism radiated from Silicon Valley and across the Web. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of MIT’s Media Lab, published a book, Being Digital, proclaiming that the Web would usher in a new generation “free of many of the old prejudices… Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony.” The Internet promised freedom from subscriptions and rental charges, and from the crass and misleading advertising dominating television. Digital companies giddily extolled their “traffic” and “page views” and “market valuations,” ignoring their sparse revenues and nonex istent profits. “New media” executives marched to conferences attended by “old media” and gleefully insulted them: “You guys don’t get it!” they’d say. “Open up. Share your content. Dump your expensive printing presses. Use the Internet as a promotional platform and your business will grow.” But how to make money? No one knew.
Greed was also in the air, provoked by dreams of untold riches. Business students flocked to Silicon Valley. Optimism was the drug of choice. Page and Brin opened Google’s first office in the living room of the two-bedroom graduate housing unit in Escondido Village that Sergey shared with a roommate. The Google computers and server were stored in the living room of Larry’s graduate residence. Their machines placed a serious strain on the limited electrical supply, and they learned to break into the basement of Larry’s building to reset the circuit breaker. “Fortunately, I had taken up lock picking so I could get us into there,” recalled Brin. He had read a book written for the very purpose: The MIT Guide to Lock Picking.
Page and Brin had definite ideas and were not easily swayed. They “thought it was sleazy,” Motwani said, to allow Web sites to pay to appear near the top of searches, as other search engines permitted. They were determined to build a computer system that would never lack capacity, as the one at Stanford sometimes did. To build user trust they wanted a simple, functional home page without advertising or pictures; they wanted to serve users by getting them off the Google site as quickly as possible and on to their destination. Page and Brin wouldn’t spend a penny to market Google. Anyway, they didn’t have a penny; they had just about maxed out their three credit cards. They believed in word-of-mouth advertising: they had the best search engine, and they were sure word would spread.