Larry Page
Co-founder of Google
Born 1973
Photo: Marcin Mycielski, European Parliament (Stansfield) · CC BY-SA 4.0
«If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning.»
Larry Page co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998, turning a Stanford research project into the world's dominant search engine. He served as chief executive of Google and then of its parent Alphabet until 2019 and remains one of the richest people in the world.
Key achievements
- Co-founded Google in 1998 with Sergey Brin
- Co-invented PageRank, the algorithm behind web search
Universities
Stanford, California (next to Palo Alto)
MS in computer science, 1998; began a PhD under Terry Winograd, built the BackRub search engine, and took leave in 1998 to run Google without completing the degree.
Facts
- His PhD project was to map the link structure of the Web; the ranking algorithm he devised, PageRank, is named after him rather than after web pages.
- BackRub ran on Stanford's servers and at one point consumed almost half of the university's entire network bandwidth.
- Google was incorporated in September 1998 in a Menlo Park garage rented from Susan Wojcicki, who later ran YouTube.
- Both his parents taught computer science at Michigan State University, and he had a home computer from the age of six.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.