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<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Big Tech. I'm your host Daniel Cole. Today

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<v Speaker 1>we're diving deep into one of the most fascinating origin

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<v Speaker 1>stories in Silicon Valley history, the birth of Google. It's

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<v Speaker 1>a tale of two brilliant minds, a revolutionary algorithm, and

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<v Speaker 1>a quest to organize the world's information that would reshape

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<v Speaker 1>how humanity accesses knowledge forever. Our story begins in nineteen

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<v Speaker 1>ninety five at Stanford University, where two doctoral students were

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<v Speaker 1>about to embark on a collision course that would change everything.

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<v Speaker 1>Larry Page, a computer science PhD student from Michigan, arrived

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<v Speaker 1>at Stanford with an ambitious vision. He wanted to download

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<v Speaker 1>the entire web and examine just the links between pages.

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<v Speaker 1>It sounds almost quaint now, but this was revolutionary thinking

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<v Speaker 1>at the time. Then there was Sergey Brinn, a mathematics

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<v Speaker 1>prodigy who had immigrated from the Soviet Union as a child.

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<v Speaker 1>Brynn was initially assigned to show Page around campus during

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<v Speaker 1>a prospective student visit. According to both founders, they disagreed

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<v Speaker 1>on nearly everything during that first meeting. Yet somehow, this

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<v Speaker 1>intellect actual friction would prove to be the perfect catalyst

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<v Speaker 1>for innovation. By nineteen ninety six, the two had begun

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<v Speaker 1>collaborating on a search engine called BackRub, Yes that was

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<v Speaker 1>actually its original name. The system operated on Stanford's servers

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<v Speaker 1>for more than a year, eventually consuming so much bandwidth

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<v Speaker 1>that it nearly crashed the university's Internet connection. But what

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<v Speaker 1>made BackRub different wasn't just its voracious appetite for data.

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<v Speaker 1>It was the revolutionary algorithm at its heart. Page had

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<v Speaker 1>developed what would become known as page rank, named after

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<v Speaker 1>him rather than web pages. The insight was deceptively simple

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<v Speaker 1>yet profound. Instead of just counting how many times search

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<v Speaker 1>terms appeared on a page, why not analyze which pages

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<v Speaker 1>other pages linked to. If reputable sites linked to a page,

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<v Speaker 1>that was like a vote of confidence. The more quality

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<v Speaker 1>links pointing to a page, the more authoritative it likely was.

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<v Speaker 1>This represented a fundamental shift in how we could understand

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<v Speaker 1>information quality on the Internet. Previous search enginess often returned

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<v Speaker 1>results filled with spam and irrelevant content. PageRank promised something different,

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<v Speaker 1>a way to surface genuinely, useful, trustworthy information by harnessing

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<v Speaker 1>the collective intelligence of the web itself. By nineteen ninety seven,

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<v Speaker 1>Page and Brin registered the domain Google dot com. The

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<v Speaker 1>name came from Google, the mathematical term for the number one,

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<v Speaker 1>followed by one hundred zeros. It perfectly captured their ambition

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<v Speaker 1>to organize the seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

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<v Speaker 1>Working from their Stanford dorm rooms, they built their first

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<v Speaker 1>data center, using lego blocks to hold hard drives together.

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<v Speaker 1>The improvised setup became legendary and Silicon Valley lore. The

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<v Speaker 1>breakthrough moment came when they realized their search engine wasn't

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<v Speaker 1>just better than existing alternatives, it was dramatically better. Users

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<v Speaker 1>who tried Google often had what can only be described

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<v Speaker 1>as revelation moments. Finally, here was a search engine that

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<v Speaker 1>seemed to understand what they were actually looking for. In

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<v Speaker 1>September nineteen ninety eight, Google was officially incorporated as a company.

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<v Speaker 1>Sun Microsystems co founder Andy Bechtelsheim had written them a

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<v Speaker 1>check for one hundred thousand dollars made out to Google Inc.

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<v Speaker 1>Before the company even legally existed. They had to scramble

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<v Speaker 1>to incorporate just so they could deposit the check. The

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<v Speaker 1>early days were characterized by relentless focus on search quality

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<v Speaker 1>above all else, while other Internet companies were rushing to

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<v Speaker 1>add features like email, chat, and news. Google maintained an

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<v Speaker 1>almost monastic dedication to perfecting search. Their homepage remained famously sparse,

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<v Speaker 1>just a logo, a search box, and two buttons. This

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<v Speaker 1>minimalist design wasn't just esthetic. It reflected a core philosophy

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<v Speaker 1>that users came to Google for one thing, to find

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<v Speaker 1>information quickly and efficiently. What's remarkable about Google's origin story

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<v Speaker 1>isn't just the technical innovation, but how Page and Brin's

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<v Speaker 1>academic backgrounds shaped their approach to business. They published papers

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<v Speaker 1>about their algorithms, embraced tresans parency about their methods, and

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<v Speaker 1>maintained that organizing the world's information was fundamentally about democratizing

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<v Speaker 1>access to knowledge. By two thousand, Google was handling one

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<v Speaker 1>hundred million searches per day. The company that started as

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<v Speaker 1>a university research project had become an essential utility for

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<v Speaker 1>millions of people worldwide. The algorithm, born from Larry Page's

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<v Speaker 1>curiosity about weblinks and Sergey Brinn's mathematical rigor had evolved

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<v Speaker 1>into something approaching a universal answer machine. Looking back, it's

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<v Speaker 1>easy to see Google's success as inevitable, but the reality

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<v Speaker 1>was far more uncertain. The late nineteen nineties were littered

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<v Speaker 1>with failed search engines and dot com casualties. What set

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<v Speaker 1>Google apart was the founder's unwavering belief that better technology

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<v Speaker 1>would ultimately win, combined with their academic rigor in constantly

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<v Speaker 1>testing and improving their algorithms. The Google origin story reminds

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<v Speaker 1>us that some of the most transformative technologies emerged not

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<v Speaker 1>from boardrooms or marketing departments, but from genuine curiosity about

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<v Speaker 1>how to solve difficult problems. Two graduate students asking how

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<v Speaker 1>to better organize information created tools that billions of people

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<v Speaker 1>now use every day to navigate our increasingly complex world.

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<v Speaker 1>This episode was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.