The Google Boys

Larry Page and Sergey Brin--cagily described in this A&E Biography entry as two Ph.D. “wannabees”--are responsible for the website where we and our friends worldwide make 200 million search queries per day. The Google search engine was introduced in 1998--when tens of millions of people were coming to the web for the first time--and helped bring some level of order to the chaos of the Internet. Distinctive from other search engines (such as Yahoo, which relies on human cataloging and categorization of websites, and is supremely labor intensive), Brin and Page's Google uses a famously top-secret algorithm that ranks search results according to the number of other pages linking to a particular page, among a large number of other variables (in fact, the concept of “page rank” birthed a cottage industry of Internet search engine “optimizers” who promise to place customers' websites towards the top of the list for searches). Tracing the Google boys' computer science days at Stanford University, followed by their rapid rise to prominence after a former Sun executive wrote the pair a hefty check as seed money, this profile combines interview clips (featuring plenty of Google trivia, including the origins of the name) with a layperson's look at the remarkable technology from a company who not only made a successful IPO splash in 2004 but also boasts "don't be evil” as its motto. Recommended. Aud: P. (C. Block)