How Two Stanford Nerds Revolutionized the Internet by Creating Google

Imagine two college students at Stanford, just messing around with a research project, and suddenly they change the entire internet forever. Sounds wild, right? That’s exactly what happened with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the brains behind Google.

They met in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry was this curious guy who loved figuring out how things worked, and Sergey was the sharp coder who questioned everything. They didn’t exactly hit it off at first, but soon enough, they teamed up to work on a project called Backrub. The goal? To create a search engine that ranked web pages based on how many other pages linked to them. This was a big deal because back then, search engines just looked for keywords, which meant you often got tons of useless results.

What made Backrub special was the invention of PageRank. Think of it like a popularity contest for websites. Instead of just counting keywords, PageRank looked at the quality and quantity of links pointing to a page. This meant the search results were way more relevant and useful. Imagine thinking your research project will be used by billions of people to find stuff online : this was peak nerd magic.

An exaple of a garage where google started

Larry and Sergey didn’t start Google in some fancy office. Nope, they worked out of a tiny garage owned by Susan Wojcicki, who later became a big name at YouTube. This cramped space was where they built the first version of Google. It was messy, chaotic, and full of energy. They realized pretty quickly this wasn’t just a school project anymore — it was a real business idea.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Convincing people that the internet was worth investing in was tough. Funding was tight, and many didn’t see the point of a new search engine. Larry and Sergey had to hustle hard, pitching their idea to investors who often didn’t get why their link-based ranking system mattered. They kept improving their tech, proving that Google could find better answers faster than anyone else.

From those early days in a garage, Google grew into a company that changed how we find information. It went from a messy startup to the go-to search engine for billions worldwide. The way Google organizes the web still shapes how we learn, shop, and connect every day.