Google's homepage 1998–1999
Early history
 |
| Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2003 |
Google
began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford
working on the Stanford Digital Library
Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling
technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library."
and was funded through the National Science Foundation
among other federal agencies.
In search for a dissertation theme, Page considered—among other
things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.
His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this
idea (which Page later recalled as "the best
advice I ever got")
and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a
given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks
to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations
in academic publishing in mind).
In his research project, nicknamed
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