Homework #3

Larry Page and Sergey Brin cofounded the monolithic search engine google. I am going to focus on Larry Page. Larry Page was born in Michigan in 1973. His father was a proffessor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the university of Michigan. Larry got his bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan and his masters at Stanford.
The concept of google was born while the two men were both students at Stanford getting their PHd's in computer science. Larry picked a dissertation theme that focused on the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, which viewed the web as a huge graph. At this point he teamed up with Sergey Brin. Larry then took it further by finding out which web pages link to others, by considering the backlinks and their value to the page. The backlinks are incoming links to a webpage. The number of backlinks is one direct indication of the popularity of that page.
To convert the backlink data into a list of importance for a given page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and they realized that this could be used as a search engine far superior to anything out there. The first version of google was made available through the Stanford website in 1996.