ICT Innovators 

Founders of Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

1973–

Lawrence Edward Page is an American computer scientist that co-founded 
Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. Brin’s parents, both academics, immigrated from 
Russia to America in 1979, where Brin started his education. Page and Brin met 
at Stanford University, where started work on a search technology they called 
BackRub. It allowed users to input a query term and returned a list of links ranked 
by importance. Increasing numbers of users lead to the creation of Google. 

Page and Brin wanted to take all the world’s information and make it accessible 
and useful for everyone. To do this they developed the PageRank algorithm to 
replace BackRub. PageRank, named after Larry Page, weights websites that have 
been linked to by other websites more frequently as being more important. Since 
1999, Google has added over 250 different elements that now help rank the 
importance and relevance of a page, instead of just links, including data about 
your location, website metadata and URL details.

To me, this is 
about preserving 
history and 
making it available 
to everyone.

Sergey Brin

The ultimate 
search engine 
would understand 
exactly what you 
mean and give 
back exactly what 
you want.

Larry Page

We do lots of 
stuff. The only 
way you are 
going to have 
success is to 
have lots of 
failures first.

Sergey Brin

Googlebot is a webcrawler 
that collects information 
from websites to build a 
searchable index for Google

Search Engine Optimisation 
is the process of designing 
a website to feature highly 
in search engine results

‘Google’ is a misspelling of 
the word Googol, the number 
1 followed by 100 zeroes

When the company was 
incorporated in 1998, it 
was based out of a garage



Activity – Comparing Search Engines

Search Engines

Software systems that are designed to search large numbers of possible links on the web to find matches to your 
search term.

In the past, search engines would favour links to websites that had a lot of other connections (links) in and out 
of the page. 




More recently search engines have their own, secret, and constantly changing way of suggesting links to you 
that could be based on a number of factors.

Search Engine Bias

Open a web browser window or tab with each of the following search engines:

Enter the exact same search term in each of the engines above.

What do you notice? 

Bing logo. [Image] (2016). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bing_logo_(2016).svg Dogpile font [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved from https://deltafonts.com/dogpile-
font/ DuckDuckGo logo. [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#/media/File:DuckDuckGo_logo.svg Ecosia logo. [Image] (n.d.). 
Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia#/media/File:Ecosia_logo.png Google. [Image] (2016). Retrieved from https://m.facebook.com/GoogleIndia/photos/a.1772655736302198/1772655742968864/?type=3&source=45 Vectors from www.freepik.com

Did You Know

Google began as engine called BackRub created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin 1996. This search 
engine worked by comparing the number of backlinks pages had with each other. The higher the 
number of links between pages, the higher up the search the link would be listed.