Sergey Brin

Cofounder of Google

• Born: August 21, 1973
• Place of Birth: Moscow, Russia

Primary Company/Organization: Google

Introduction

Sergey Brin cofounded Google, the leading Internet search engine, with Larry Page; the company has since expanded into many other Internet services, including e-mail, cartography, shopping, blogging, and social networking. Brin and Page are also noted for their emphasis on articulating a corporate philosophy based on making the world a better place and helping people to access information freely.

Early Life

Sergey Brin was born to a Jewish family in Moscow, Russia (then part of the Soviet Union), in 1973; his father was a professor of mathematics. The family fled the country in 1979 to escape anti-Semitism and settled in Maryland, where Brin's father held a post at the University of Maryland. Brin attended the Miskan Torah Hebrew School and the Pain Branch Montessori School, then Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. He began programming at age nine, on a Commodore 64 computer that his father had given him. He began studying mathematics at the University of Maryland at age fifteen and dropped out of high school after his junior year to enroll full time in the university. Brin earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland in 1993 and won a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He began studies for a PhD in computer science at Stanford in 1993, where in 1995 he met future collaborator Larry Page.

Life's Work

While at Stanford, Brin and Page developed a project called BackRub, initially as a class asignment. BackRub was a new kind of search engine that analyzed the number of backlinks connecting one web page to another; they analyzed this information to evaluate the usefulness of the different pages, with the logic that pages with more links were probably more useful. Brin and Page operated BackRub on the Stanford servers for a year but ran into trouble with the university because of the amount of bandwidth it required.

It was already clear that an efficient search engine would be a useful product, because the rapid growth of the Internet (including an estimated 25 million web pages by the late 1990s) meant that users needed a way to locate the best and most relevant information without getting sidetracked by minimally helpful or irrelevant web pages. Brin and Page tried to sell their idea to existing search engine companies such as Excite and Infoseek, then decided to develop the search engine on their own. Both left Stanford in 1998 and moved their computer equipment into a friend's garage, while living in rented rooms in Menlo Park, California.

The name Google refers to a very large number called a googol (written as the digit 1 followed by 100 zeros), in reference to the large number of web pages on the Internet; the domain name was registered as google.com because the website googol.com had already been taken. The company Google, Inc., was incorporated on September 7, 1998; it would attract $25 million in venture capital by June 1999.

The google.com website is noted for its simplicity; initially this was because of the founders' lack of expertise in creating websites but was retained as a design feature because of its efficiency. However, the algorithm PageRank, which powers Google searches, is extremely sophisticated, searching an index of the World Wide Web rather than the web pages themselves. The index (which included more than 3 billion web pages by 2001) is created by so-called web crawlers, which follow links on the web to catalog web pages; PageRank analyzes the index in a manner similar to a popularity contest, in which a link from one page to another is interpreted as a “vote” and links from pages with many links to them (more popular pages) count more than links from pages with few links to them.

Google received more than 18 million queries per day in 2000, becoming the default search provider for Yahoo! in the same year. In May of 2000, Google was released in ten foreign languages, and by September fifteen languages were offered, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. By 2002, the number of languages had grown to seventy-two, including Klingon (the language of a species featured in the television franchise Star Trek). In December 2000, the plug-in Google Toolbar was released, allowing users to conduct Google searches without visiting the company's home page. A final innovation that year was AdWords, a program that displayed targeted advertising (sponsored links) to companies selling products related to the keywords in an individual user's searches. The AdWords system was creating more than $600 million in annual revenue for Google by 2003.

Because of the growing dominance of Google as a search engine and the importance of being near the top of search results (studies have shown that most users do not look at more than one page of results), other companies developed programs and strategies to “game the system” and improve their ranking on Google; in response, Brin and Page have continually refined the Google algorithm; they have also developed a blacklist to block sites that abuse the search process.

In 2001, Eric Schmidt joined Google as the company's chairman and chief executive officer; Brin became president of technology at this time, and Page became president of products. In the same year, Google created Google Groups, after purchasing the Deja News Research Service (an archive of Usenet messages), and created test versions of Froogle (a search engine for shopping) and Google News (a service that searches the web for news stories). In December 2003, the company launched Google Print, which included small excerpts from books in search results. In 2004, Google created Gmail (a free e-mail service), Google SMS (a short message service), and Google Desktop Search.

In April 2004, Google announced the date of its initial public offering (IPO) and stated that the IPO would be conducted as a Dutch auction, with anyone allowed to bid for stock. The auction began on April 13, 2004, and ended five days later. Stock prices dropped from more than $120 per share to about $85 over the course of the auction, generating less money than anticipated; however, on the first day of trading on the NASDAQ, share prices surged to almost $110.

Since the IPO, Google has continued to innovate and expand, following principles articulated by Brin and Page in 2004: They focus 70 percent of their resources on their core business of the Google search engine, 20 percent on ancillary services such as e-mail, and the remaining 10 percent on innovation. Innovations in 2005 included Google Maps, Blogger Mobile, institutional access for Google Scholar (so users can locate journals in their home libraries), Google Earth (a mapping service using satellite imagery and search capabilities), and Google Analytics. In 2006, Google launched Google Calendar, Google Trends (an application to visualize chronological changes in the popularity of searches), and Google Checkout (for online purchases); the company also acquired YouTube that year. In 2007, Google added traffic information to Google Maps for thirty cities and Street View in five cities. By May 2008, Google Translate was available in twenty-three languages (which had grown to more than sixty by 2012), and in August 2009 Google Street View expanded to Japan and Australia. Google Voice was launched in 2009, as was the venture capital fund Google Ventures, the Google Translator Kit, Google Dashboard, and the surveillance tool Flu Trends. In 2010, Google launched a new indexing system, Caffeine. In 2015, Google reorganized under a holding company known as Alphabet, Inc, and Brin became the president of this parent company. He stepped down in 2019.

Personal Life

Brin was married to Anne Wojcicki, a biologist and cofounder (with Linda Avey) of the biotechnology company 23andMe, which sells rapid genetic testing services; Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park was Google's first work space after Brin and Page left Stanford. Brin and Wojcicki have two children. They divorced in 2015. Brin married Nicole Shanahan in 2019.

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken. “The Search Party.” New Yorker 83.43 (2008): 30–37. Print.

Brin, Sergey, and Larry Page. “Letter from the Founders: ‘An Owner's Manual for Google Shareholders.'” New York Times (2004): n. pag. Print.

Brandt, Richard L. The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. New York: Portfolio, 2014. Digital file.

Byrne, John A. “The 12 Greatest _Entrepreneurs of Our Time and What You Can Learn from Them.” Fortune 165.5 (2012): 68–86. Print.

Collins, Margaret. "The Big Business of Being Sergey Brin." Business Week 4423 (2015): 42-43. Business Source Alumni Edition. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.

D'Onfro, Jillian. "Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Lays Out the Many Ways the Company Uses A.I. Today." CNBC, 27 Apr. 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/04/27/alphabet-founders-letter-2017-sergey-brin-on-ai.html. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Elias, Jennifer. "Sergey Brin Says Google 'Definitely Messed Up' Gemini Image Launch." CNBC, 4 Mar. 2024, www.cnbc.com/2024/03/04/sergey-brin-says-google-definitely-messed-up-with-gemini-launch-.html. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Lowe, Janet. Google Speaks: Secrets of the World's Greatest Billionaire Entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Hoboken: Wiley, 2009. Print.

Vise, David A., and Mark Malseed. The Google Story. Upd. ed. New York: Bantam Dell, 2008. Print.