Born - March 26, 1973 Michigan - USA Lives - America

Larry Page and his business partner Sergey Brin changed the way most people use the Internet. The pair started the Google search engine while working on their Ph.D.s in Computer Science at the Stanford University, USA. They initially had no plans to start a business, but were simply doing research for their Ph.D. Google quickly went from a research project of two Stanford students to being one of the most visited websites on the Internet. 

Lawrence E. Page was born on the 26th of March, 1973 in Michigan, USA. Page always had a keen interest in computers while growing up and was encouraged by his father, Dr. Carl Victor Page ; a computer science professor of Michigan State University. 

Larry Page graduated from the East Lansing High School and went on to earn a bachelor of science degree in engineering, with a focus on computer engineering at the University of Michigan. It was while studying his Ph.D. at the Stanford University that he met Sergey Brin.  

The Beginnings of Google

Page and Brin began work on a project called "The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" or simply, The Anatomy of a Search Engine. Their challenge was to crawl the web efficiently and provide more relevant results than the search engines that were available at that time. The dramatic growth of the web presented problems in crawling the web, keeping the crawled information up to date, storing the indices efficiently, and handling many queries quickly. The Google project relied on the PageRank technology that the pair developed. 

Google PageRank™

PageRank provided the basis for Brin and Page's Ph.D project and continues to be the major factor in Google's search algorithm today. Google PageRank™ ranks the quality of each web page using a complex calculation of link structure. The Google website describes PageRank in the following words;

"Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.' "

Larry Page never finished his Ph.D because of the great success of his Google search engine. It was started in 1998 and grew rapidly every year since its beginnings. Page and Brin started with their own funds, and that of their friends and family but the site quickly outgrew their own available resources. They eventually received private investments through Stanford to fund the rapid growth of up to 20% per month. 

"We had to use all of our credit cards and our friends' credit cards and our parents' credit cards." Larry Page 

In its early years Google allowed no advertising in their search engine results. The search engine became profitable in 2000 with the introduction of unobtrusive text advertisements placed along side search results.  

Google became a public company on August 19, 2004, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange as GOOG.  

Larry Page became president of products in 2001. He and Brin managed the company up until it reached more than 200 employees in 2001, when they handed over the CEO position to Dr. Eric Schmidt. Larry Pages continues to play an important role in running the company with Schmidt and Brin. 

In 2005 Larry Page has an estimated wealth of $US7.2 billion according to the Forbes business magazine. Forbes ranks Larry Page as the 55th richest man in the world at just 32 years of age.