Chapter 4, Google Is Born Summary

Larry Page and Sergey Brin start BackRub, a precursor to Google, at Stanford University as a project to determine what links lead back to a particular Web page. In 1996, Page lets his unique crawler loose from his own Stanford Web page. The idea is to build a mathematical graph of the relative importance of Web sites, and thus create a ranking by site importance. Page, an admirer of Nikola Tesla, wants BackRub to be both an interesting academic study and something useful that could be commercialized. Tesla is known for doing interesting studies, but he never profited from any of them. Where Page has the vision, Brin brings his mathematics talents to the study. Between them, they build the underlying philosophies and technologies that will become Google.

One of these core technologies is PageRank, a central mathematical...