From Googol to Google:

“I always wanted to be an inventor,” said Larry Page, the co-founder of search engine Google and former Stanford doctoral student.

Page, 30, spoke to a full auditorium of Stanford students at the teaching center of the Science and Engineering Quad on Friday. His talk, entitled “Stanford and Google and the World, Oh My!” was a humorous and insightful account of how the now profitable and popular search engine came into being.

Page explained that the creation of Google was by pure chance. After his adviser suggested that Page investigate the Internet, Page collaborated with a fellow student, Sergey Brin, to create a system for exploring the Web.

“We built a whole ranking system for Internet sites,” he said. “We accidentally created a search engine.”

Brin and Page initially named their creation BackRub, based on its ability to analyze the “back links” to a Web site.

“But we realized BackRub wasn’t the world’s greatest name,” Page said. Instead, he and Brin looked through Web sites and URLs before finally stumbling across a list of very large numbers. The word “google” was at the top.

A friend later pointed out, however, that the number is actually spelled “googol.” But the misspelling had two o’s and ended with ‘le’ so they decided to stick with it, Page said. Plus, the Google domain name was still available.

A googol is the number one followed by 100 zeros. According to the Google Web site, “There isn’t a googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles, not atoms.” The name reflects Google’s mission to organize the limitless amount of information on the Web.

Originally, the whole Google system consisted of a dozen computers in Page’s dorm room. To save money, Page and Brin built the computer housings out of Lego bricks. The early search engine could also only handle one query every second. Beyond that, the search took forever, Page said, because of the system’s low capacity.

Despite these limitations, Google slowly started gaining popularity among Internet users. Realizing that Google needed room to expand, Page and Brin tried selling their burgeoning creation to all of the major Internet companies at the time. Every company turned them down. One CEO even told them that users didn’t care about searching on the Web.

“We were Ph.D. students,” Page said. “Reluctantly, we went on leave and we started a company.”

Google may have started out as a few computers, but Page and Brin were soon able to amass over $25 million in investment money to start their company.

“This is how we spent all of our money initially,” he said, “continuing in the Lego tradition, we decided to build our own machines. A third of them didn’t work at any given time.”
Page attributed much of Google’s continued success to luck and timing.

“We missed the boom and bust,” Page said of the Internet economy. “We didn’t go public during the boom and we didn’t go bankrupt during the bust.”

Google was able to be profitable at a time when most other Internet sites were in the red, he said, because of the very nature of search engines.

“Everybody searches like every day,” he said. “There aren’t that many other things you do every day, I mean you brush your teeth.”

One of the challenges of creating a useful search engine for a wide range of users is being able to account for human error. To demonstrate, Page used the example of one of the most popular searches on Google: “Britney Spears.” Page displayed a list of the hundreds of ways people had spelled the singer’s name, ranging from “Brittany Speers,” to “Britney’s Spear” and even “Prittanay Spearese.”

“It turns out that most people misspell some things,” said Page, who confessed that he also had trouble with spelling. Misspelled words cause huge problems for search engines, he said. “You end up finding documents with misspelled words, which is not really what you wanted.”

To compensate for spelling mistakes, Google now suggests the proper spelling for many common words, from “Britney Spears” to “environmental.” In the future, Google may be able to do even more, Page said. An ultimate search engine, Page said, could even be considered artificial intelligence.

“The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people — or smarter,” he said. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”

One audience member had already felt the power of the smart search engine. Jeffrey Chang, a doctoral student in medical informatics, recently created a new Web site on the Stanford system. Before he had completed the setup process, Google had found his site. As Page opened the floor to questions, Chang had one question.

“How did you find me?” Chang asked.

“Someone must have linked to you,” Page answered.

“I hadn’t even finished putting up the data,” Chang said later. “I’ve been scratching my head for a week on how they found it.”