Larry Page and Sergey Brin met each other at a graduate student orientation at Stanford in 1996. Both were studying for their PhDs in computer science, and both were interested in analyzing large sets of data. Because the web was growing so rapidly, they decided to start a project to improve the way people found information on the Internet.
They weren’t the first to try this. Hand-curated sites like Yahoo had already given way to more algorithmic search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which both started in 1995. These sites attempted to find relevant webpages by analyzing the words on every page.
Page and Brin’s technique was different. Their “BackRub” software created a map of all the links that pages had to each other. Pages on a given subject that had many incoming links from other sites were given a higher ranking for that keyword. Higher-ranked pages could then contribute a larger score to any pages they linked to. In a sense, this was a like a crowdsourcing of search: When people put “This is a good place to read about alligators” on a popular site and added a link to a page about alligators, it did a better job of determining that page’s relevance than simply counting the number of times the word appeared on a page.
