Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the two co-founders of the internet search engine Google. The two met at Stanford University in the 1990s where they were both attending graduate school. Together, they ended up collaborating on a paper titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Eventually, this paper would lead Brin and Page to launch the Google search engine in 1998.http://www.ted.com/speakers/sergey_brin_and_larry_page.html

In 1998 Brin and Page officially opened up for business, the two of them working out of a garage in Menlo Park, California. At that time, there were already a number of other search engines on the market. The paper that Brin and Page had worked on previously at Stanford contained the conceptual foundation which set Google apart from the competition at that time: The idea of ranking search results by analyzing the number of times each site had been linked to from another site.http://www.ted.com/speakers/sergey_brin_and_larry_page.html Additionally, Google was different in that it had a very minimalistic site, as it continues to have today.http://www.ted.com/speakers/sergey_brin_and_larry_page.html

The two figured that if a site was linked on a number of other sites, then it was more likely than not a relevant search item and thus should be ranked higher than others. Shortly after opening their first office in the Menlo garage, around 1999 Brin and Page launched their search engine on the internet. Since that time, it has continued to rise in popularity and mainstream use.http://www.ted.com/speakers/sergey_brin_and_larry_page.html

One of the original ideas that Sergey Brin and Larry Page both developed for use at Google was the PageRank algorithm. This algorithm is the cornerstone of Google's success. In 1996, the first version of Google was launched on Stanford's servers, and in 1998 the two partners founded their company and officially named it Google, Inc. The term "Google" is intended to be similar to "googol". "Googol" is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Their idea of 20 Percent Time enables and encourages Google's workers to spend up to 1/5th of their time working on and developing other projects that interest them most. This idea of Google founders Brin and Page has resulted in many successful projects over the years.

AdSense and AdWords was another Google idea that has paid huge dividends. Using an algorithm similar in nature to the one use with their PageRank idea, Google is able to generate website-based advertisements on the fly that are also relevant to the page in question.