- Person
- Larry Page
- Lived
- b. 1973
- Field
- Web search
- From
- American
The story
Larry Page was born in Michigan in 1973. His mother is Jewish, though he grew up in a secular household. In 1995 he visited Stanford University, where he was considering graduate school, and was shown around by a student named Sergey Brin. By the following year the two had formed a partnership.
At the time, the young World Wide Web was growing fast, but finding reliable information on it was hard. Page's research project, called BackRub, studied the links between web pages. His insight was that a link from one page to another works like a vote of support, and that a link from an important page counts for more. A page linked to by many highly ranked pages should itself rank highly.
Page and Brin turned this idea into an algorithm in 1996. It was named PageRank, a play on Page's own name and the term web page. They built a search engine around it, soon renamed Google, and in 1998 they formally incorporated Google Inc., working from a garage in Menlo Park, California. Their stated mission was to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
PageRank was the first algorithm Google used to rank results, and it remains the basis of its web search tools. Because Google search is free to anyone with an internet connection, a student, a farmer, a patient or a small business owner anywhere in the world can find information that once required a library, an expert or luck.
The mathematics behind PageRank also proved useful far beyond web search, because it can be applied to any network. Researchers have used versions of it to measure the influence of scientific papers, analyse networks of proteins in biology, identify species that are essential to ecosystems, study road traffic and even rank sports teams.
PageRank began as academic research at Stanford, and its legacy is a simple, powerful idea that made the vast and chaotic web navigable for billions of people.
Why it matters
PageRank made the web searchable for everyone, giving billions of people free and instant access to information, and its mathematics now helps scientists study networks from proteins to ecosystems.
About Larry Page
Co-founder of Google whose PageRank idea made the web searchable, putting the world’s information within reach of anyone with a connection, free of charge.
More about Larry Page
Sources
- PageRank Wikipedia
- Our story Google
- Larry Page Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.