The Internet entered a new dimension in the late 1990s. Web pages multiplied at an unimaginable pace, and search engines of the time struggled to keep up. AltaVista, Lycos, Excite: all faced the same problem. How could they sort through these millions of pages and separate the useful from the trivial?
Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in 1995 at Stanford. They were doctoral students, fairly brilliant, and began working on BackRub, a project that examined the links between web pages. The idea came to them quite naturally: an important page must be one that many other pages point to. The more references flowing in, the more legitimacy the page gains. It’s simple, almost obvious in hindsight.
A year later, BackRub transformed. The project took on a new name, inspired by the mathematical term "googol" which denotes 10 to the power of 100. This reference reflected their ambition: to index a colossal mass of documents. The PageRank algorithm was born from this thinking, assigning a score to each page based on the quantity and quality of incoming links, creating a sort of spontaneous hierarchy of web content.
In September 1998, the two students founded Google Inc. in a garage in Menlo Park. Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, advanced them $100,000. A few months earlier, they had tried to sell their technology to Excite for one million dollars. George Bell, the CEO, refused. This decision ranks among the most monumental mistakes in Internet history.
The technology made the difference. In 1999, Google was already processing 3.6 million queries daily. The interface was clean, the speed impressive, and above all the results were accurate. Internet users quickly realized this. The company developed efficient indexing methods and built a distributed infrastructure capable of absorbing unprecedented data volumes.
Google didn’t just read page content. The algorithm examined their position in the web’s network. It analyzed the text of links pointing to a page, making content indexing possible without having visited them. This approach worked remarkably well for images or PDFs.
The business model gradually took shape. In October 2000, the AdWords advertising system was launched, with advertisers buying keywords to appear in results. The innovation lay in the auction system and the clear separation between sponsored links and organic results. User trust remained intact.
Growth accelerated at the turn of the 2000s. The number of indexed pages went from 1 billion in 2000 to over 4 billion in 2004. Google built its own data centers, equipped with custom-designed servers. This technical mastery maintained performance despite the traffic explosion.
The corporate culture fostered innovation. The motto "Don’t be evil" set a course. Engineers had 20% of their time for personal projects. Gmail and Google News would emerge from this freedom. The company attracted the best talent by offering them a stimulating environment and generous conditions.
The 2004 IPO used an original auction system. The success exceeded expectations: the valuation reached $23 billion on the first day. Google’s dominance in the digital economy was no longer in doubt.
Google transformed our relationship with knowledge. The search engine became a daily reflex for hundreds of millions of users. Our ways of searching and accessing information changed permanently. The influence extended beyond search: the techniques developed by the company, particularly in processing massive data sets, inspired countless innovations.
PageRank found applications in network analysis, far beyond web search. Advances in distributed data processing, infrastructure management, and machine learning established benchmarks that still structure 21st-century computing.