Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

Brin was athletic but uninterested in team sports; he lost himself instead in gymnastics, swimming, Rollerblading, and biking. Still, Brin was more outgoing than many self-described geeks and enjoyed playing practical jokes. He also took on extra projects that aroused his interest; a typical project was the numbering system for the rooms in the Computer Science Building (donated by Bill Gates, who would become a nemesis). In the building, each room was identified with a four-digit code, which Brin felt did not convey the most useful information to the building’s tenants. “We were offended at having four-digit numbers when you don’t have ten thousand rooms,” he said. Along with computer science professor Vaughan Pratt, he set out to devise a better system, one that would enable someone leaving a given room to calculate the distance to his destination. “We came up with a sensible three-digit numbering system. It was quite elegant. Most buildings are numbered in a really stupid way. The architect or somebody sits down with the blueprint and they collate across and they number things. It looks great to them when they are looking at the blueprint. When you’re actually walking around, it makes no sense at all. The Gates building is fairly simple. I just had the numbers roll around the building. Even numbers were exterior, odd numbers were interior… The second digit told you how far around the building you had to go. It was very intuitive, if I may say so myself.”

THE SERGEY BRIN WHO was obsessed with efficiency would find a soul mate in Larry Page. Larry was born in Lansing, Michigan, where his father, Dr. Carl Victor Page, was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State. His mother, Gloria Page, had a master’s degree in computer science; she taught at the university before becoming a database consultant. With Larry and his older brother, Carl, the Pages lived comfortably in a middle-class neighborhood. By age seven, Larry was proficient on the Exidy Sorcerer computer his dad had brought home, and this ignited his interest in technology, as did the technical magazines and electrical engineering assignments his father also brought home, and his brother Carl’s skill at taking things apart. Larry’s family, like Sergey‘s, welcomed argumentative challenges. The Pages were readers, and Larry fondly remembers vacations to Oregon when they’d take an empty suitcase to fill it with books from the renowned Powell’s Books, in Portland. Unlike Sergey, however, he was conspicuously quiet, and had a bad case of acne. He was a loner, someone who as an adult friends would describe as shy and strangers would describe as asocial. He chose not to follow his mother’s faith, Judaism, but like his father chose not to embrace a religion. Perhaps this was but one reflection of an unsettled home; his parents divorced when he was eight, and his father married a colleague at Michigan State. Carl, nine years older, left home after high school to get a computer science degree. He later was a founder of eGroups.com, an Internet company sold to Yahoo in 2000 for about four hundred million dollars.

Just as Sergey was fascinated by Richard Feynman, Larry was inspired at age twelve by a biography of Nikola Tesla, whose pioneering work led to the development of electricity, power grids, X-rays, and wireless communication. Tesla was an extraordinary but unsung scientist, an Edison without the fame or wealth and who, despite his discoveries, died bitter and destitute. Page told me he learned from Tesla that “you can invent the world’s greatest things, but if you just invent them it doesn’t accomplish that much… I found it very sad. You can imagine if he were slightly more skilled in business, or with people, he’d have gotten a lot more done.” Brilliant ideas alone would not suffice. Timing and follow-through, and raising resources, really mattered.

“I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world,” Page once said. He became convinced that in order to effect scientific change he needed to start a business. Inventing things, he once said, “wasn’t any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect. So probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually.” When he thought about the kind of company he wanted, Larry told me, he thought of his grandfather, an assembly-line worker in the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, who during sit-down strikes fearfully carried a heavy iron pipe wrapped in leather as protection from what he described as strike-breaking “goons.” Happy employees, Larry came to believe, are more productive.

The rival for Larry’s attention was music. He had begun playing the saxophone as a child, and he played with considerable skill. After finishing his first year at East Lansing High School, Larry was among the talented musicians chosen to attend summer sessions at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan. But the lure of engineering soon triumphed over music. Like his father, mother, and brother, Larry enrolled at the University of Michigan. He didn’t have much choice. “My dad actually said to me when I was deciding what school to go to, ‘We’ll pay for any school you want to go to-as long as it’s Michigan,”’ he once said.

With his short dark hair and stark black eyebrows and 5 o‘clock shadow, he looked like Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, but his high-pitched voice made him sound like Kermit the Frog. He remained an introvert while studying engineering at the university. Nevertheless, he imagined that one day he might start a company, and insisted on taking business courses. He also stood out; a brilliant student, he served as president of Eta Kappa Nu, a national honor society for electrical and computer engineering students. Preoccupied with finding more efficient ways to do things, he led a still nascent effort to build a monorail that would replace forty buses to connect the North and the Central Campus. He attended a leadership training program at the university, where he encountered a slogan he would often repeat as an adult: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

For his graduate studies, he had his heart set on Stanford, a university where even the names of the buildings attest to the men whose careers were spawned there: William R. Hewlett, David Packard, Jerry Yang, James Clark. Yet for all of his ambition and achievements, he feared he was not up to the task. “I kept complaining to my friends that I was going to get sent home on the bus,” he once told Michigan ’s alumni magazine. “It didn’t quite happen that way.”

THE STANFORD CAMPUS, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, is spread over eight thousand acres. Like the Google campus that Page and Brin would one day build, Stanford offers free bus service, plentiful food, a bucolic setting, and shared spaces where students can collaborate. By the time Larry arrived in 1995, Sergey had been there two years; he was on the orientation team that welcomed Larry to campus. Sergey, as was his wont, immediately began needling Larry with questions. “We argued a lot,” recalled Brin, mostly about local zoning and city planning. The field didn’t particularly interest Brin, but arguing did. “We ended up talking a lot.” The other students were content to tour San Francisco; Larry and Sergey were curious about other things. Even today, their idea of a relaxing time is to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show and ask questions about the cool new technologies on display, or quiz astronauts about space flight.

Larry found an academic mentor in Terry A. Winograd, a computer science professor who had won a National Science Foundation grant to explore the future of online information. Larry bolted upright one night from a dream, he said many years later when describing how he suddenly had a vision for search. “I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links… I grabbed a pen and started writing!” He told Professor Winograd, “It would take a couple of weeks to download the Web.” Winograd nodded, he said, “fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me.” Larry downloaded the entire link structure of the Web, not quite knowing what he’d do with it. He realized that links weren’t organic; they were the result of conscious effort. In a sense, users were voting for the best links when they chose to visit a site, or when they included a link on their own site. He had a bold idea to craft a different kind of search engine that would use these links to catalogue not just an island of the Web but the entire ocean.