History of Google company 2

Learning to count

In January 1996, Larry, Sergey and other students of the “computer technologies” course, together with the teachers, moved to a beautiful four-story stone building, the inscription above which read: “William gates computer science”. The head of Microsoft allocated $ 6 million for the construction of this building, and therefore had every right to give it a name at its discretion. Gates himself did not study at Stanford, but his company employed quite a few graduates of this university, and he hoped that having a well-known phrase (“William gates” read like “Bill Gates”) in the title would increase the likelihood that talented young professionals choose Microsoft. Gates stressed that his gift is "an investment in the future of the high-tech industry." At the opening ceremony of the new academic building, James Gibbone, dean of the engineering department, predicted that “in the next year and a half this place will become a cult. Rooms, cabinets and corners will appear, which will show visitors with the words: “Here! It was here that they started in 1996! Now they hoo hoo! ""

Larry Page was assigned audience number 360, which he shared with four other doctoral students: gushing ideas, eccentric and energetic Sean Anderson, who then turned this audience into a normal living room; taciturn Ben Zoo; "Hyperactive" Lucas Perrier and the only girl among them - "computer fanatic" (according to her) Tamara Manzner. The financial boom in Silicon Valley, triggered by the development of the Internet and the release of Netscape to the stock exchange, forced many doctoral students to think about the advisability of continuing their studies. “It’s very difficult to stay in doctoral studies,” says Manzner, “when real job offers are poured from all sides. I seriously thought about quitting after the end of the next semester. ”

Despite the tightness - or perhaps because of it - companionship quickly developed among the students. Sergey Brin was initially identified to a different audience, but he spent most of his time in the 360th, next to Page. The Stanford leadership asked Brin to develop a numbering system for the audience of the new corps. Having coped with this task, he, in turn, asked that the doctoral students' chairs be changed to more comfortable ones. “Sergey is a smart guy,” smiles Anderson, recalling the housewarming party.

Soon, the 360th audience, through Anderson’s efforts, turned into a mini-jungle: lianas curled along the walls and ceiling, and pots of flowers stood on the tables. He also brought a five-gallon bucket and pump, the water supply to which the computer controlled. “I built an automatic irrigation system,” says Anderson. - It was a snap. Our room was crammed with gadgets and devices. ” He also connected an electric piano to his computer, which everyone could play. And Manzner brought a pillow so that you could take a nap right on the floor.

Larry and Sergey have always been together. In the town they were called so - LarrySergey - in one word. “They are great guys, great comrades,” says Manzner. - We all sat up at the computers almost until the morning. I remember Saturday, three in the morning, and in the audience - full of people! I then thought: “What kind of fans are we all the same!” We were all passionate about our business, and everyone was happy. ”

Brin and Page endlessly tease each other. According to Manzner, they were in a good sense "nerds", but not insolent.They simply adored arguing and arguing with each other and with other students. The guys all the time talking about computers, philosophy - about everything that came to mind. Once they had a lively discussion about whether it is possible to build a home-sized monitor from lima beans. Hearing this, Manzner spun in her chair and exclaimed: “Yes, you are crazy!” And somehow, in the corner of the room, under Larry’s desk, they assembled a computer shelf from Lego parts. All the inhabitants of the room already knew: when starting work, you should turn off the “external noise”, that is, Larry and Sergey. “I learned how to program with headphones,” notes Manzner.

Page's favorite subject for discussion was the development of new, more advanced transport systems. Larry, whose childhood was spent in the suburbs of Detroit, invented ways to move people and goods from one point to another, which would reduce the number of traffic accidents, reduce costs, air pollution and traffic intensity. “He talked a lot about computer-controlled vehicle systems. Suppose a certain number of cars run through the streets of the city, and if you need to get somewhere, you just sit in one of them and call the address. They function, in essence, like taxis, but they are cheaper to ride on, and such cars can snuggle up on the freeway, ”Anderson recalls. - He was very interested in the issue of moving people or goods around the city. Larry liked to look for solutions to social problems. ”

Thirty-year-old professor Rajiv Motvani, Sergey’s scientific consultant, watched with interest the process of the formation of “intellectual kinship” between Brin and Page, getting more and more into them with sympathy. “Both are extremely talented,” says Motvani, “but each is talented in his own way.” Sergey is a practitioner and engineer who solves specific tasks.According to his logic, if something works, well, fine. He has a mathematical mindset, he likes to communicate with people."Previously, he was a little impudent, but at the same time very clever and erudite young man, just glowed with intelligence."Motvani Brin entered the office like in his own, without knocking. Paige is a thinker by nature, he wants to get to the bottom of the point, to understand "why it works." Not less ambitious guy, but much more modest Sergey. Before entering the office Motvani, he necessarily knocked. “Whenever a group of twenty students gathered to discuss a certain issue, Sergei was the leader. Larry sat quietly, and only after everyone dispersed, he asked: "What do you think about ...".

Sergey's manner of behavior was not typical for Stanford doctoral student. “He is very direct, very pushy. Such assertiveness is rarely met, ”said Dennis Ellison, a professor at Stanford University. Sergey is completely immersed in the conversation. He shows by his appearance that he understands you, and says what he thinks. It's nice to talk to him. ”

Bryn and Motvani worked on the problem of extracting information from large data arrays. They created a research group called MIDAS (Mining Data at Stanford - "Stanford Information Analysis and Search Program"). Bryn invited scholars who specialized in this subject to the meetings of the group members held once a week and selected topics for discussion. He and Motvani wrote a number of scientific articles on this issue.

The methods of statistical analysis of data were then resorted mainly to determine which combinations of products customers buy in supermarkets most often and, accordingly, what adjustments should be made to the product distribution scheme. Bryn and Motvani decided to experiment - to apply these techniques to the newly emerging, unorganized Internet. In the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web looked like the Wild West - just as uncontrollable, unrestrained by the rules of decency and uncontrollable. Millions of users, of course, were pleased: an e-mail appeared, which significantly simplified communication, but scientists who hoped to draw information from the Internet quickly became disillusioned with it. The first search engines designed to help search the Web — Web-Crawler, Lycos, Magellan, Infoseek, Excite, HotBot — fell short of expectations. “The search engines of that time were not impressive,” recalls Motvani. “You’ve received a completely useless list of sites.” In 1995, Motvani tested the search system Inktomi, developed at the University of California (Berkeley), in which he defended his doctoral dissertation. He typed the word "Inktomi" and pressed the "Search" button. “No miracle happened.Her address in the results was not - she could not find herself. "

Meanwhile, Jerry Yang and David Filo, Stanford doctoral students, who were preparing to defend their thesis, adopted a slightly different approach to the search: they attracted the editors, who compiled a catalog of websites in alphabetical order.Yang and Filo gave their company the name Yahoo !. Their approach really simplified the process of finding the right information, however, it was also imperfect, and the number of sites grew by leaps and bounds. Bryn and Motvani have tried many other directories and search engines, but each time they received hundreds or even thousands of results in a completely arbitrary sequence. To find the necessary information, they had to manually filter out unnecessary links, which took a lot of time. Bryn and Motvani were convinced that there should be a better way to search for information on the Internet.

Page, who worked on the Digital Libraries project, somehow stumbled across the web on AltaVista, a new search engine. It produced results faster than other search engines, and, moreover, it had a new feature: in addition to the list of web site addresses, the words with color appeared in the search results pages - the so-called “links”. This greatly accelerated the work on the Web: by clicking on a word or phrase highlighted in the text, the user instantly reached another web page containing more information on the topic of interest. Page wondered: what can be learned from link analysis?

Hector Garcia-Molina, one of Page's scientific consultants, agreed that analyzing link data might provide interesting information. AltaVista did not perform any operations with them - just put them on the results pages. Paige, through careful analysis, wanted to find out how else to use them. But in order to be able to test his assumptions, he needed to acquire a large database.

After completing the necessary calculations, Paget told his scientific adviser that he was going to download the entire World Wide Web onto his computer.

This idea did not seem as bold as it was absurd. But Paige, without any doubt, announced that he would download the entire Internet quite quickly and without any problems. Garcia-Molina and his colleagues just smiled condescendingly. Larry, however, was determined to carry out his plans. He was not alone in assessing the significance of links: Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer technology expert who developed the World Wide Web in 1989, asserted in the early 1980s that, by clicking on words, computer users would be able to go from one web site to another. pages to another, and links will be a key element of the Web.

In the fall of 1996, by combining their efforts, Page and Brin began downloading and analyzing web pages with links.Collecting information took much longer than expected (Page even calculated that each sending of a spider program to the Internet cost the computer technology department $ 20,000), but Larry really wanted to go to the end. His desire to determine how important cross-references attracted the attention of not only Bryn but also Motvani to the project - after all, Page's project opened up new opportunities for researching the Web. Bryn also attracted not only the prospect of working with her friend, but also purely scientific interest in the problem of extracting information from large arrays of random data. The World Wide Web was for Brin an ideal target for applying his mathematical abilities and programming skills.

Page had an idea: by counting the number of links to a single website, it was possible to approximately determine the degree of its popularity. Yes, popularity and content are not the same thing. But both in his family and in the Brin family, articles published in scientific journals, which were provided with links to other works, were valued. Links to web pages reminded Paige of links in articles. Scientists referred to previously published scientific works studied by them, and the number of references in the scientific community served as a measure of the influence and authority of the author. "Links are very important," said Page. “The names of the Nobel Prize laureates appear in the references of ten thousand scientific papers.” A large number of references in the scientific literature "speaks of the significance of your work, since it was considered necessary to mention it."

The same can be said about websites, Paige concluded. Soon a thought struck him: links have a different degree of importance! Some are more important, others less so. More weight is likely to have links placed on important websites. And how to determine which sites are among the "important" and which are not? It's very simple: sites that have more links to are more significant, and vice versa. In other words, the website, the link to which appears on the main page of the popular search resource Yahoo! automatically becomes more meaningful. Larry gave the name of PageRank to his program for determining the degree of importance of links: page is a part of the word webpage (web page) and at the same time its last name, a rank means “rank”.

Stanford professor Terry Grape, another scientific consultant to Page, notes that the path to finding a way to rank web pages was based on link analysis. “After all, at first, Larry had intended to wander around the Net haphazardly. The development of the algorithm was prompted by a desire to make life easier for Internet users. He went to the pages, clicked on the links and noted on which sites he most often gets. That's how PageRank appeared. ”

Larry and Sergey were confident that the results of the practical application of PageRank would serve as the basis for their doctoral dissertation. By early 1997, Page had developed a primitive search engine called BackRub, which processed links to web pages. Her logo was a black and white image of the palm of his left hand Larry, made using a scanner. Bryn and Motvani also contributed to the development of the project. Motvani even suggested that the fruits of their labors would soon go beyond university studies. As a result, they received a program for ranking web pages, simultaneously solving one of the main problems of finding information on the Web. “Initially, they did not set themselves the goal of creating a search engine.They simply worked on solving interesting problems, putting forward interesting ideas, says Motvani. “Larry suggested something, Sergey suggested something, I ... And after a while we realized that we could create a search engine.” Grapes agrees with him: "They did not seek to start their own business, but simply wanted to improve the process of finding information."

Bryn, Page and Motvani developed a search engine prototype for internal use. This mechanism, created on the basis of the traditional technology and the new PageRank program, was a program for searching information on the Internet, which gave the search results in descending order of their relevance. If the other search engines simply compared the words in the query string with the words on the web pages, PageRank also lined up the results in a logical sequence. Finally, computer users were able to quickly find the information they need on the web.

In the fall of 1997, Bryn and Page decided to give their offspring a different name. Paige still could not find the word easily remembered and not used in other names, and therefore turned for help to Sean Anderson. “I went to a clean blackboard and started brainstorming, but he kept saying:“ No, this is not that, ”“ recalls Anderson. This went on for several days. “We were almost desperate to think of something, but continued to wrestle. And then I say: “What about the Googleplex? You do need a name for a system that searches for information, indexes a web page and allows users to systematize huge amounts of data? So Googleplex is a big number. ” He liked this variant: “Not bad, but you shorten it. Let's say google “. I typed the word "google" on the computer - as it turned out later, it was not quite right - and showed it to him.Larry nodded his head in agreement, and in the evening of the same day registered a new name and wrote it on our board - Google.com. Now the search resource has owned a huge directory of sites - like Yahoo! or amazon. The next morning I saw Tamara’s comment on the blackboard: “You wrote this word wrong. It is spelled googol. ” But the “wrong” name was already registered. ”

In 1997, the search engine became available to Stanford students, faculty, and administrative staff at google.stanford.edu. The news of this was quickly spread around campus. The University Technology Licensing Bureau has applied for a patent. And students and professors started using Google to search for information on the web. “It very quickly became the only search resource for me,” Professor Dennis Allison admitted. “I made Google the default search engine,” Vinograd echoed.

Unable to attract professional designers, Brin designed the Google homepage fairly straightforward. And I didn’t lose it: users find its distinctive design very attractive. The multi-colored letters of the logo and the white background create a feeling of purity, which is so lacking in the Internet space. The Google home page contrasted sharply with web pages full of flashing banners, colorful drawings and texts — the vast majority of them on the Internet. Since products and services were not advertised on Google, users felt quite at ease here. “The design of the resource is great,” says Allison. - If you contact a design company with a request to develop a design for the main page, you will never get one like this. On the Google homepage, there are no funny characters, no metallic colors, no sound, no light. Its design is a challenge to the established opinion that users like to wander around the site, accompanied by sound and lighting effects. ”

As the database and user base grew steadily, Brin and Page constantly needed computers. They couldn’t buy new ones, they didn’t allow finances, and therefore they bought components, from which they collected PCs, and from time to time they visited the loading and unloading area of the town hoping to get some unclaimed computers. “We borrowed several cars for a time, arguing this way:“ If they were not taken immediately after delivery, it means that they are not that much needed ”, explains Bryn. Scientific consultants of two inventors, who knew about their difficulties, provided them with 10 thousand dollars in the framework of the project “Digital Libraries”. When there was no space left in the 360th auditorium, Bryn and Page relocated their data center to Page's dorm room. “We collected PCs and connected them to our computer network,” says Page. “In the end, we realized that such an approach would allow us to achieve a lot.” “Larry used every opportunity to save money,” recalls Charlie Orgish, head of the computer systems department at Stanford.

Taking a seat at the Mandarin Gourmet restaurant table, Page and Bryn prepared to tell Paul Flaherty, a graduate of Stanford doctorate and the creator of the search engine AltaVista, about the merits of their search technology. They hoped that AltaVista would pay as much as $ 1 million for the right to acquire the PageRank program, a patent for which is about to be received. This program will allow the Flaherty search system to give search results in descending order of their relevance, and a company whose market share in the search for information on the Internet is 54% certainly will not deny itself the pleasure of adopting advanced technology. And Bryn and Page, in turn, will be able to continue their studies at Stanford University.

After listening to Flaherty's story about how AltaVista works, Google inventors only confirmed that their search engine is more sophisticated. Still, one fact from Flaherty’s story impressed them: the entire AltaVista database in printed form would be a pile of paper 60 miles high, and the search engine is able to “pull” any word from this pile in less than half a second. Dennis Ellison, the initiator of this meeting, was interested in what the parties would end up with - after all, Bryn and Page made an impression of people confident of the superiority of their product.

AltaVista, they said, is only the initial stage, and the future is in Google. Flaherty agreed that the concept of Google developers is promising. “I was interested in their approach to ranking web pages based on links. At the time, this was the weak point of my search engine, ”he later remarked. But he warned beginner inventors: problems fall just as the search resource becomes popular. From time to time, someone tries to get into your system, hack your website, perform various kinds of manipulations with your search engine. But Bryn and Paige were not frightened: they were absolutely confident in their technology and wanted to bring it to all users. “They enthusiastically talked about what they could do,” recalls Allison, “and were eager to share this with others. In essence, the meaning of their words was as follows: AltaVista is no good at all. It does not meet the needs of users. They also had a PageRank program. ”

However, a few weeks after the meeting at the Chinese restaurant, Bryn and Page received a letter from Flaherty in which he reported that AltaVista rejected the offer to acquire Google. The management of its parent company, Digital Equipment Corp., was against innovation from the side. “The company's IT managers were not too supportive of innovations,” Flaherty later explained. “They didn’t accept technologies that were“ not created here. ” The situation was complicated by the fact that Digital Equipment Corp. was going to make a merger with Compaq Computer. In addition, the search engine was no longer a priority for AltaVista itself, since the company expanded the range of services provided: now on the AltaVista website one could view the latest news, make purchases, create electronic mailboxes, etc.

Later, with the assistance of Stanford professors and the patent bureau, Bryn and Page made a proposal to purchase PageRank to Excite and other companies specializing in searching for information on the Internet, but in vain: it seems that nobody was interested in their improved search engine. Everyone thought only about how to place more advertising on their web pages. The guys and Vinograd even visited the office of a venture capital firm on Sand Hill Road, but there they were not eager to invest money in the “search”. If Larry and Sergey considered the search server as a necessary tool for working on the Internet, others saw in it only one of the services of the “buffet”. But the Google developers did not give up. “They are skeptical of the majority opinion,” Vinograd notes. - If they see that everyone acts in this way, but they themselves believe that they should act differently, then, as a rule, they insist that those and others are mistaken. They were sure of the correctness of their approach and believed that the majority was mistaken. ”

Yahoo! Inc., which they considered to be the main potential buyer (its key element was thematic catalogs, edited manually, and the search speed left much to be desired), rejected the offer to purchase Google technology or buy a license for the right to use it. The main reason for the refusal was probably the fact that company executives wanted users to stay longer on the Yahoo! site. The Google search engine is designed to promptly provide users with answers to their queries, directing them to the most relevant websites. But the thematic directories Yahoo! served both to respond to inquiries and to retain users on Yahoo.com: there they could make purchases, view promotional offers, check their mailboxes and play games. David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo! when meeting with Brin and Page, he told them that if they believed in their unique search engine and wanted to realize its potential, they should take academic leave and start their own business. If it is really as good as they say, it will quickly become popular - because the number of Internet users is constantly growing, and they, the users, always choose the best.

Larry and Sergey were upset by refusals and did not know what to do. “They couldn’t decide,” Vinograd recalls, “to leave or continue their studies.” And after many months of fruitless attempts to sell their offspring, they decided to temporarily focus on improving Google for Stanford users, and then we'll see.

Once, while working with the GIMP graphics program, Sergey created a color version of the Google logo with an exclamation point at the end, like Yahoo! He was very pleased with the new design, which was a combination of "kindergarten" capital letters of different colors, but even more so with the fact that he had finally mastered this GIMP.

In the spring of 1998, Bryn and Paige sent a “email to Google friends” (the so-called list of first users) email. “Google, in its current form, has been operating for more than a month, and we would like to receive feedback from you about the work of the search engine,” they wrote. - How do you evaluate the search results? What do you think about the new logo and the format of the main page? Is it convenient to work with them? We are waiting for your comments, comments, information about crashes in the program, ideas. Thanks in advance. Larry and Sergey.

In July, under the search results issued by Google, there were fragments of text, where the words indicated in the query string were highlighted in bold. Now, Google users could see which results were most interesting for them without visiting the websites. “In the next few months, we plan to introduce a number of new products to Google. We are going to significantly expand our index of web pages, which currently has 24 million copies. We thank everyone who sent us their logo options and offers. We wish you a good time with Google, ”they wrote in the next letter.

Although the tone of these emails was optimistic, Vinograd knew that Larry and Sergey, figuratively speaking, rested against the wall. To ensure the growth of Google, they had to take certain risks and overcome the boundaries of the campus.At the same time, without university funding, they will not be able to acquire much-needed computer equipment. Grapes represented the entire complexity of the situation. "I told Page:" I do not understand where you are going to get the money. "And he answered: “You will soon understand. We think about it. ”

On a sunny August morning in August 1998, Larry and Sergey sat on the terrace of a house in Palo Alto (California), looking forward to the arrival of the "angel" from Silicon Valley. They worked on the search engine tirelessly, but they, despite the strictest savings, ran out of money. Stanford University professor David Cheriton invited them to meet with his good friend, the leading figure in the world of IT technology, Andy Bechtolsheim, who gained fame as a successful investor.

Bechtolshaym arrived in silver Porsche. Coming out of the car, he immediately went to the terrace, where the master of the house and his doctoral students were waiting for him. Unlike most of the magnates of Silicon Valley, Bekhtolshaym worked a lot - but not because he needed money, but because he believed in the power of technology and loved to look for new solutions.

Another feature of his character was modesty. Many of those with whom he worked when he was vice president of Cisco Systems, and had no idea that Behtolshaym was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, and two years earlier he had sold Cisco to another company founded by him for hundreds of millions of dollars. He became interested in Brin and Paige after Cheriton's story about a new way to search the web. “At that time I used the Internet mainly to search for information,” says Bechtolshaym, “but AltaVista, then considered the best search engine, didn’t suit me as a user.”

He wanted to know more about the project. How far can the creators go in implementing their ideas? Page explained that using a network of low-priced PCs, they can download web pages, put them in their index, and in a fraction of a second “comb” the entire Internet in search of relevant information request. The only problem was that they had no money to purchase equipment.

Behtolsheimu liked the idea, but he doubted its commercial viability - after all, AltaVista and other search engines were unprofitable. Some entrepreneurs even viewed the search engine as a kind of directory on the World Wide Web that did not have much benefit and advantage. Bechtolsheym, however, was not sure of the correctness of such a judgment: more than a hundred years ago, a single innovation, the Dewey decimal system, radically changed the approach to the classification of books in libraries around the world.

Brin and Paige were absolutely not timid in the presence of Bechtolsheim, and he liked their courage. He has already heard plenty of stories about super-promising technologies that have never become a super profitable business. And therefore, during the boom of the high-tech industry, when new companies with the com expansion in the name appeared on the stock exchange almost every 15 seconds, he was skeptical about healthy PowerPoint presentations that were hypnotic to the audience. He has his own method of assessing new risk enterprises, proven over the years, which is based on three components: a clear idea that allows to solve a real problem; a business that can make a real profit; talented, enthusiastic and motivated founders.

And besides, he trusted his instincts and colleagues. Cheriton, a professor with business experience and business savvy, was one of them. The professor, in turn, knew that Bechtolshayma’s participation in a risky venture greatly increased his chances of success - not only because he invests his money in him, but also because he has connections among financiers and IT specialists and he meticulously approaches the search for new ideas and young talents. Speaking with Cheriton's doctoral students, Bekhtolshaym quickly realized that they were talented and purposeful - even if they lacked experience and money.

After a long conversation and demonstration by Brin and Page of the possibilities of Google, Behtolshaym already had a complete understanding of the technology that enabled the search engine to produce such high-quality results. In the young talents he was bribed by the fact that they preferred to purchase computer components and assemble computers on their own, rather than invest money in advertising and expensive equipment. They wanted to develop an open and accessible database, after which they could safely go to venture capital firms with proposals to finance their activities. And they also wanted their search engine to become known without additional advertising infusions. “Other Internet companies were spending money from venture capital firms on advertising,” says Bechtolsheim. “And these two believed that their search engine would become popular only thanks to positive user reviews.” It was a qualitatively new approach: developing a truly useful service that people would recommend to each other. ”

Convinced that the technology of Brin and Paget is actually capable of coping with a real problem, Bechtolshaym moved on to the main thing.

- So, the key question for a start-up Internet company: how are you going to make money? As an investor, I am attracted only by those ideas that will provide me with a profit.

He proposed to make the search engine services Google free, and later to place on its pages advertising offers.However, Larry and Sergey were suspicious of advertising; in addition, they feared that pages with search results dazzling with promotional offers would look unpresentable. Their position on advertising, they stated in a scientific article on the search engine Google. There were other options for making money. Friends discussed with Bechtolsheim the possibility of granting licenses to other companies to use their search engine. In addition, it was not worth to dismiss and the possibility of its acquisition by some large corporation.

At Bechtolsheim, the search engine was associated with an electronic catalog that resembles the Yellow Pages directory, where advertising layouts are always present next to the addresses and phone numbers of companies providing a variety of services.

“This is the best idea I've ever heard of,” said Bechtolsheim. - I want to participate in this venture.

Brin and Page are confused: what do they usually do in such cases? Noticing this, Bekhtolshaym, who had a great experience of such meetings behind him, suggested immediately writing a check so that they could acquire the necessary computer components, and he would go to the next business meeting. No negotiation. No discussion of the amount of capital and asset valuation. Bechtolsheim did not even know that Bryn and Page had not yet formally created a company. At that moment, the details were not interesting to him. After all, many years ago, he, one of the founders of the newly created company Sun Microsystems, was also impromptu, wrote a check for a round sum by one businessman, thereby issuing his participation, as it turned out later, in an extremely successful enterprise. Now Bechtolsheim himself wanted to formalize his participation in Google in this way. “Without further ado, Behtolshaym wrote out in the name of Google Inc. a check for $ 100,000, ”Brin recalls.

This check Page put in the drawer of his desk. Two weeks later, they registered to Google and opened a bank account to which they deposited the specified amount.

So, Cheritona’s mission was crowned with success. A twenty-five developers immediately went to the cafe Burger King - to celebrate such a joyful event. The fact that Bekhtolshaym approved their undertaking gave them confidence in their abilities and elevated them in the eyes of parents, friends and acquaintances, and therefore they did not make it difficult to get about another $ 1 million, which they needed to buy equipment and equipment. continuation of the project.

Sitting behind the wheel of his Porsche, Andy Bechtolsheim, a businessman who had the gift of Midas, of course, did not realize the full significance of the decision he made a few minutes ago. “My thought flashed that they could probably attract millions of users to their search engine, and after some time they would start making money. But I did not expect that all this will become so large. And no one imagined! ”

At audience number 380, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were preparing to demonstrate the power of Google to the intellectual elite of Stanford University. Stanford professor Dennis Ellison, who invited two young inventors, asked them to talk about how this search engine works and how it surpasses the more well-known information search technologies on the Internet. Doctoral students and professors of the department of computer technology, gathered in the audience, eagerly awaited their presentations. The speakers decided in advance that they would not speak about the financial side of the enterprise. They wanted to tell about how the “magic composition” turned out from a set of different ingredients, which gave Google the ability to instantly find the information the user needs and give the search results in descending order of the degree to which they match the query.

The event was organized by Professor Allison in the framework of discussions on Wednesdays devoted to important achievements and breakthroughs in the field of technology. He respected Bryn and Page very much for his energetic and assertiveness, high intelligence, precocious, mature approach to business, as well as ambitions transformed into a desire to solve such tasks that others considered overwhelming. The challenging tasks of Bryn and Page were only provoking. Over the years of teaching at the university, Allison has seen many talented IT specialists, mathematicians and engineers, but these two definitely stood out. Compare was with whom. The future founders of Sun Microsystems, Yahoo! Logitech and other well-known companies. The creators of Google were not like anyone. “They are exceptional,” says Allison. “They represent the pinnacle of computer hacking.”

The word "hacking" Allison meant is not illegal activity on the introduction of computer networks and fractured websites.Among programmers and computer scientists, “hackers” refer to those who are able to write qualitatively new computer programs - programs that open up opportunities for innovation. The word that he used is not accidental. Many at Stanford had great ideas, many had the necessary motivation, but very few were able, overcoming all obstacles, to bring their ideas to life.Allison was delighted with how tenaciously the guys held on to their bright dream of changing the world for the better. “They are not driven by the desire to earn more money, but by the idea of an ideal world,” notes Allison. - The idea of digitizing the entire Universe and thus making available all sources of information occupied the minds of many people, but no one dared to begin its practical implementation. And they have already taken the first steps in this direction, successfully eliminating the obstacles that have arisen in their path. And I am sure that they will succeed. "

For Brin and Page, five minutes to businessmen, this meeting was a good opportunity to present their developments to a large audience and get feedback from the university environment - the alma mater of many scientific discoveries. Many of them warned about the need to carefully protect against sneaky competitors information about financial performance, strategies and production secrets of the company. Therefore, even those who had gathered in the 380th audience were not going to devote themselves to all the nuances, knowing that this could easily generate new competitors.

- I'm Sergey Brin, and this is Larry Page. So let's get started, ”Bryn said lightly. He began with an example: an employee of the company goes on a business trip to another city, where he will need a car. He enters the site of a known search resource and types the words “car rental” in the query string. However, among the search results on the first page there are no websites of companies providing such a service. The problem is that the results are presented in descending order of the total number of the words “car” and “hire” on a web page. And if this employee typed "car rental" in the query string on Google, he would get the results, ordered by degree of compliance with the request. In confirmation of his words, Bryn entered this phrase into the Google search box and clicked on the Search button. The first positions in the list of results were taken by the addresses of the official websites of Avis, National, Dollar, Alamo, and others, for a split second taken from the millions of addresses on the World Wide Web pages.

“The main task was to make our search server produce results not in descending order of the number of words in the text, but in descending order of the degree of relevance to the query,” explained Brin. - We studied this topic about three years ago. In the process of research, we formed the concept of the importance of a web page and developed the PageRank algorithm, which is the main component of the Google search server, which I would like to tell you today.

Finding out how websites are related to each other was pretty simple. It was much more difficult to create a search engine that would produce relevant results, for which it was necessary to study the "communication lines" (or links) between sites and a number of other factors. What is the purpose of website operators placing links on web pages? They do this so that users can access other sources of useful information on the Internet, and hope that this in turn will attract new visitors to their sites.

“The biggest challenge for us, the developers,” Bryn continued, “was to index the entire World Wide Web. A lot of information. We will show you how we did it. We will tell you what we are doing so that users can get the most relevant results that we have achieved over the past almost three years, as well as address issues of a social nature.

Those who had the desire and time to get acquainted with the technical details, Brin offered to sign up for a course on search engines, which he and Page led in the semester that had begun, but promising students access to "sources that you will not find anywhere else in the world." Well, over the next hour Brin and Page were going to explain in general to the crowd how they developed the Google search engine.

- So, what makes the search engine work? - asked Bryn.

The question is rhetorical, so the speaker answered it himself:

- In the World Wide Web today there are millions of websites and hundreds of millions of web pages - according to the latest data, three hundred million. So how do we develop a search engine? However, everything is not so bad. Moore’s law is on our side.

Moore's Law was the main driving force behind the development of high technology. In the mid-1960s, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that processor performance would double every fifteen-five years. That is why the giant supercomputers, which were then owned only by large companies, universities and government agencies, were replaced by convenient and affordable PCs. This trend continues today. Bryn explained how Moore’s law is related to the creation of a search engine capable of “browsing” the entire Internet in search of information.

- Every year a lot of texts and materials are created, but computer disks are becoming more and more capacious. We will be able to put all the knowledge, all the information accumulated by mankind, into your pocket - with the exception of video carriers, of course - in a couple of decades. It is quite feasible. And then all, absolutely all information will be collected on a single carrier, and you can work with it, analyze it, as we did. True, there is one problem: a person cannot process search results in a split second. Unfortunately, Moore’s law does not apply to people — they develop somewhat more slowly. We need to seriously address this issue.

At these words, the audience laughed.

Since Bryn decided to temporarily interrupt his studies at Stanford University and fully devote himself to developing a search engine, he considered it necessary to explain to the audience what direction he and Larry are moving.

- We are going to translate Google on a commercial footing. How exactly - you will see in the near future on Google.com. We are also working on a number of points that will allow us to improve our offspring.

Listening to Bryn, Allison suddenly realized that doing it all perfectly was much more difficult than it seemed from his story. However, if someone was able to do it, then only they, the Google developers.

Google searched for more factors than any other search engine. She didn’t just count words or links and produce results. She combined word and link information with other variables in such a way that the results provided were as relevant as possible. For example, factors such as the distance between individual words or phrases on a web page, the font in which they are typed, the type of letters (uppercase or lowercase) are taken into account.

“We try to use all possible information,” Bryn went on. - We look at the whole process through the eyes of the user. It is clear that such a search requires significant amounts of memory, and we have them.

Effective search is ensured not only by the correctness of mathematical formulas and equations, but also, most importantly, by the presence of much more powerful equipment than their competitors. Larry and Sergey, unlike the developers of other search engines, quickly realized that the only possible way to ensure the most relevant results was to invest in equipment. Their plans included not only the creation of software, but also the full support of the computer network: software and hardware are inextricably linked with each other, and therefore it is very important to optimize their functioning.They knew that they would certainly benefit from the fact that the prices of storage devices and other computer components are steadily declining, and their characteristics are constantly improving. It is better to buy individual components and assemble the PCs themselves, they decided, since from the very beginning they preached the most complete approach.

While Dennis Ellison listened to Bryn’s explanations, various episodes from university life with Bryn and Paige appeared in his memory. He had a very high opinion of them. They could be trusted. The guys really wanted to create something useful.In addition, they were young and with character. These qualities are especially important: in the high-tech industry, consumer confidence in products rests on the credibility of developers. In addition, Larry and Sergey are computer fans with an incredibly wide range of interests - the quality inherent in whole natures. They are adherents of progressive views. And with reference to Silicon Valley, this means that they are supporters of open source software systems, rather than closed ones, favored by Bill Gates and his Microsoft. And the guys did not hesitate to express their opinions on certain issues. “They don’t like some aspects of American business, and they’re not afraid to say it out loud,” notes Allison.

Meanwhile, Paige grabbed the baton from Brin. Allison also respected him very much. Larry was an excellent teacher, because he had the ability to grasp the basic idea and present it in a simple and understandable language - an ability that distinguishes people with a clear mind, who know their business thoroughly.

“Linking on the Internet is akin to linking in scientific literature,” Page explained. “But if you just count the number of links on the web, which most search engines do, you will have problems.” The World Wide Web is not scientific literature, anyone can create web pages here.

The PageRank program is, in principle, a model for using the Internet. Let's say we have a user who just wanders around the web. He looks a bit like a monkey: he sits for hours in front of a computer and stupidly clicks on links. A familiar picture, is not it?

The audience laughed together.

“PageRank says: if a significant site points to you, you get a bit of its importance,” Page continued. - Suppose that some really worthy site is pointing to you. He is much more valuable to you than any "left" web page. For example, if on the main page Yahoo! there is a link to you, it's just great. The presence on the main page of the Yahoo site a link to your web page indicates that either you paid someone a lot of money or your page is really good. But the presence of a link to your web page on the main page of my web site does not tell anyone anything. - And Paget explained how he developed a recipe for ranked search results. “We assigned numbers to all web pages that approximate their importance. The rank of a single page is the sum of all web pages that have links to it.

But there is a serious problem. Some, trying to trick search engines, make their website addresses appear in the results list as high as possible. The search engine must win this cyberwar: it must become “smarter” of all these “cunning” websites.

- Have you ever come across porn sites with search results pages? Those who have raised their hands! Paige suggested. - Oh, some have admitted. In fact, this is a big problem for search engines. Sellers seeking to earn at any cost, little care about what information you are looking for, they do not care much at all. They just want as many users to visit their web pages.

Formulating the problem, Paget noticed that he was already working on possible ways to solve it. The most effective of these is the development of a program for determining the degree of importance of websites, which will not allow their operators to manipulate the search system. Google, focused exclusively on the user, will ensure that only relevant addresses on the pages with search results.

Page did not fail to let a couple of critical arrows be addressed to other search engines:

- Search engines do not work brilliantly. If you type, say, the word “AltaVista” in the query string of another search engine, will you receive the address of the AltaVista home page? Most likely no. But on Google you are guaranteed to get it among the first results. We do all the relevant work ourselves. Volumes are very large.

A key principle for Google’s developers was breaking down complex tasks into separate subtasks that could be tackled in parallel. With the help of appropriate mathematical equations and a variety of computers, the guys created something like a production line for collecting, indexing and presenting information, guided by Moore’s law, which allowed them to acquire computer equipment at lower cost.

- We crawl on the World Wide Web - that is, we go there and download the entire Internet. “We load about a hundred pages per second,” Page says. - This process is rather complicated. All downloaded copies of web pages are stored on the hard drives of computers, we need them for analysis. Web pages are stored on almost all computers in our room.

Larry talked about the innovation, which provided Google superiority over other search engines. Stanford professors and students never missed a word.

- When the query string contains more than one word, but a phrase, our system analyzes the distance between the words . For this, we have introduced a system of equations into the corresponding program. Other search engines have a more primitive approach, and therefore they are not able to keep up with the pace of web expansion.On their background, Google with its software that allows you to load web pages as quickly as possible, clearly stands out. If you want to gain more material, you just need to "crawl" across more sites. As you can see, everything is very simple.

Larry and Sergey did not reveal all the technical details of the functioning of PageRank and Google: there could well be “spies” from other companies in the audience, and the guys, of course, did not want anyone to use the fruits of their labors.

According to Brin, the time has come to revive the presentation somewhat. Crawling on the Internet and indexing web pages is a purely technical process, he said, but in reality everything is not as simple as it seems. The fact is that some website owners consider their "spider" an uninvited guest.

“Actually, we really enjoy crawling around the web,” said Bryn. - By entering into contact with a million websites, you come into contact with a million people - webmasters of these sites. Imagine that you need to go around a million apartments to offer their inhabitants your email address. What are your chances of remaining safe and sound if you do this in, say, not the most fashionable areas of Oakland?

Separate “abnormal” webmasters, dissatisfied with the interference of Google’s “spider” into the work of their websites, in spite of their revenues threw out e-mail boxes of the company with spam or threatened to sue.

“They said they would sue us, and after a while we blocked all of Montana’s websites.” And somehow we even blocked the whole of Singapore ... True, from time to time these webmasters turn to the risk manager at Stanford - and we didn’t even know that we had one. Now we know, we talked with him a couple of times. In general, you will not get problems.

продолжение следует...

Продолжение:

Часть 1 History of Google company 2