Who is Larry Page

"The Internet and the World Wide Web were just taking shape as major forces in telecommunication when Larry Page entered Stanford. Larry Page wanted to devise a method for determining how many other web pages linked to any one given page. Existing facilities for exploring the Web could only rank search results by the frequency of appearance of a given word on any page of the Web. Searches often produced endless lists of web sites of very little pertinence to the user's query. Page soon found that ranking web sites by the number of links leading to it from other sites was a far more useful measure of a Web document's relevance to a user's search criteria. To explore the possibilities of his new "PageRank" mechanism more fully, he called on the data mining expertise of his classmate, Sergey Brin"

» Read More on Larry

We didn't start out to do a search engine at all. In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web -- which pages link to which pages. In computer science, there's a lot of big graphs. Right now, (the Web) has like 5 billion edges and 2 billion nodes. So it is a huge graph. I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time, which is really what motivates me.