A house full of computers
Lawrence Edward Page was born on March 26, 1973, in Lansing, Michigan, into a family that lived and breathed computing. His father, Carl Victor Page, earned one of the early doctorates in the field and taught computer science at Michigan State University; the BBC later called him a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. His mother, Gloria, taught computer programming at the university’s Lyman Briggs College. Page has described a childhood home that was usually a mess of computers and science and technology magazines, and he took to all of it.
When he was six his father brought home an early personal computer, and Larry was soon using it for schoolwork; he later said he was the first child at his elementary school to hand in an assignment from a word processor. His older brother, Carl Jr., taught him to take things apart, and before long he was dismantling everything in the house to see how it worked. His parents divorced when he was eight, but he stayed close to both of them. He also studied music, playing saxophone at the Interlochen summer arts camp, and has said that musical training, where everything happens in fractions of a second, gave him his lifelong obsession with speed.
Michigan and Stanford
Page graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991 and went to the University of Michigan, where his parents had met and where his paternal grandfather, a car-plant worker in Flint, had insisted his own children study. He earned a degree in computer engineering with honours in 1995. As an undergraduate he built a working inkjet printer out of Lego bricks, served on the university’s solar car team, and proposed replacing the campus buses with a driverless personal transit system.
He then entered the computer science doctoral programme at Stanford. Looking for a thesis topic, he became fascinated by the mathematical structure of the World Wide Web, a vast graph of pages joined by links. His adviser, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pursue it; Page later called that the best advice he ever received. He took a master’s degree in 1998 but never finished the doctorate, because the project grew into something far larger than a thesis.
BackRub and PageRank
Page’s insight came from academic publishing. A scholarly paper is important if many other papers cite it, and especially if important papers cite it. A link on the web, he reasoned, is a kind of citation. If he could count and weigh every link pointing to every page, he could measure which pages the web itself considered valuable. He began building a program to crawl the web and record its links, a project nicknamed BackRub. Another Stanford doctoral student, Sergey Brin, was drawn in by the scale and ambition of the idea, and the two became partners.
Together they turned the link data into a ranking method, named PageRank after its inventor, and realised it could power a search engine far better than any that existed. Their dormitory rooms filled with cheap, salvaged computers, and their growing system strained Stanford’s network. An early version went online on the Stanford website in August 1996. In 1998 they published their design in a paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which became one of the most downloaded scientific papers on the internet. By then the engine was handling about ten thousand searches a day, and as Page recalled, they figured that maybe it was real.
Building Google
In 1998 Page and Brin incorporated Google, its name a play on googol, the number one followed by a hundred zeros. They raised money from family, friends and investors, including a famous cheque for $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, and rented the garage of their friend Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park, California. Page became chief executive. The company’s stated mission was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. By June 2000 Google had indexed a billion web addresses, making it the most comprehensive search engine of its day.
Page obsessed over speed. He pushed engineers to shave milliseconds from every search and insisted that the Google home page stay famously sparse so it would load quickly. In 2001, at investors’ urging, he handed the chief executive role to Eric Schmidt and became president of products, though he remained central to the company’s direction. He personally championed the purchase of Android, a small mobile software start-up, in 2005; it became the world’s most widely used mobile operating system. Google went public in 2004, and in 2011 Page returned as chief executive.
Organising the world’s information
Before Google, finding something online often meant wading through pages of irrelevant results. PageRank changed that, and the effect spread far beyond the web. A student in a village with an internet connection could now reach the same information as a researcher at a great university. Doctors, farmers, small businesses and ordinary people looking up a symptom, a recipe or a bus route all came to rely on a search box that was simple, fast and free to use. It is one of the most dramatic expansions in access to knowledge since the printing press, and the authors of The Google Story made exactly that comparison with Gutenberg.
Page pushed the mission well beyond web pages. In 2002 he revived an idea from the Stanford days, a searchable digital library of the world’s books; he and Marissa Mayer timed themselves with a metronome turning the pages of a 300-page book to estimate the work, and the result became Google Books. Over the following years Google built or bought maps, satellite imagery, translation, email and video services used by billions of people, most of them free to use. Not all of it was uncontroversial: Google’s size, its handling of personal data and its market power have drawn serious scrutiny and legal challenges from regulators in the United States and Europe.
Moonshots and Alphabet
During his second spell as chief executive, Page talked about “moonshots” and urged his teams to build things ten times better rather than ten per cent better. In September 2013 he launched Calico, a research company devoted to ageing and age-related disease, explaining that illness and ageing affect all our families. He backed experimental projects in self-driving cars, internet access and energy, and invested personally in electric cars and in companies developing small electric aircraft.
In August 2015 Page reorganised the company into a holding company, Alphabet, with Google as its largest part, and became Alphabet’s chief executive while Sundar Pichai took charge of Google. He explained that the name stood for a collection of letters representing language, which he called one of humanity’s most important innovations. In December 2019 he and Brin stepped back from their executive roles, saying the company no longer needed two founders in management. Page remains a member of Alphabet’s board and one of its controlling shareholders.
Jewish heritage
Page’s Jewish heritage comes through his mother. Gloria Page was raised Jewish, and her father later emigrated to Israel, where, according to a 2007 profile in Moment magazine, he lived in the desert town of Arad near the Dead Sea and worked as a tool-and-die maker. His father’s family came from a Protestant background. Page grew up in a secular household, did not have a bar mitzvah, and, as Moment put it, was brought up in the mold of a father whose religion was technology. He has not spoken publicly about religious belief.
His story is often told alongside that of Sergey Brin, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Moment noted that the two young graduate students who built Google shared a Jewish background, though they related to it very differently. For Page, the connection is one of family history rather than practice: a grandfather who settled in Israel, and a mother who brought Jewish roots into a home devoted to science.
A private life
Page is famously private. He has given few interviews in the past decade and has not appeared at product launches since 2013. In 2007 he married Lucinda Southworth, a research scientist, and they have two children. In 2013 he revealed that both of his vocal cords had become partially paralysed, the left in 1999 and the right after a cold the previous summer, leaving him with a soft, hoarse voice; he made a large donation to research on vocal-cord nerve function at the Voice Health Institute in Boston.
His family foundation, the Carl Victor Page Memorial Fund, named after his father, who died in 1996, gave $15 million in 2014 to fight the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. His wealth has also drawn attention for its scale, from homes and private islands to a superyacht, and in recent years he has kept a low profile while backing new ventures, including a start-up reported to apply artificial intelligence to manufacturing.
Legacy
Few living people have changed daily life as much as Larry Page. The question he set out to answer as a graduate student, how to find the best page among millions, now underpins how billions of people learn, work and make decisions. He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he and Brin received the Marconi Prize in 2004 for an invention that fundamentally changed how information is retrieved.
His influence is debated as well as celebrated. Google’s power over what people see, and the data it collects, raise questions Page’s generation of technologists will be answering for decades. But the core of his contribution is hard to overstate. He took the scattered contents of the early web and made them findable, and in doing so put a large share of human knowledge within reach of almost anyone, almost anywhere, for free.
Sources & further reading
Larry Page, Wikipedia · The Story of Sergey Brin, Moment magazine (February 2007, archived) · Larry Page’s 2009 University of Michigan commencement speech transcript, Network World · The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Brin and Page, Stanford · Google Books history, Google · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.