Profile
Internet entrepreneur, computer scientist. Born Lawrence Page
on March 26, 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. Page's father Carl was a
pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence and his mother
taught computer programming. After earning a bachelor of science degree
in engineering from the University of Michigan, Page decided to
concentrate on computer engineering at Stanford University, where he met
Sergey Brin.
As a research project at Stanford University, Page and Brin created a
search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the
pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the
most useful. They called the search engine Google after the mathematical
term "Googol," which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their
mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the
Web.
After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the
pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world's
most popular search engine, receiving more than 200 million queries each
day. Headquartered in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, Google
held its initial public offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin
billionaires. Page continues to share responsibility for Google's
day-to-day operations with Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt.
In 2006, Google purchased the most popular Web site for user-submitted
streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock.
