Read The Google Guys for Free Online Page B

philosophy on the subject. “It was a very funny thing about Larry,” Broder recalls. “He was very adamant about search engines not being owned by commercial entities. He said it should all be done by a nonprofit. I guess Larry has changed his mind about that.”
    Brian Lent agrees with that view. He worked with Larry and Sergey on their search engine project for a while, until deciding to head off and join a start-up. (He’s now CEO of Medio Systems Inc., which sells search and advertising systems for mobile phone makers.) The problem with the Google search engine at the time, Lent recalls, is that Larry and Sergey didn’t want to commercialize it, and Lent was anxious to become an entrepreneur. Their mantra at the time was more socialistic than entrepreneurial. “Originally, ‘Don’t be evil’ was ‘Don’t go commercial,’ ” says Lent.
    That view was more Larry’s than Sergey’s. While at Stanford, Sergey wrote a scholarly paper about their creation, titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” Still, in that paper, he argued against an ad-supported service as a corrupting influence. “Advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” he wrote.
    But contrary to many reports, the two weren’t against corporations per se. Any graduate student who applies to Stanford, the genesis of Silicon Valley, is keenly aware that it’s a great place from which to launch a company. Larry and Sergey just didn’t expect Google to be the fountain that would quench their thirst to be entrepreneurs. They felt that a search engine was too important to be corrupted by financial interests.
    Craig Silverstein, another computer science Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, helped get the company started as employee number one. He was the one who didn’t really want to start a company. But, he recalls, Larry and Sergey did. “Larry always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” says Silverstein. “He always thought big about what the company would be. Sergey was a good partner for that. He thought the same way.” Silverstein ended up putting his academic career on hold in order to join Google, where he still works.

Finding Hidden Meaning
    Larry stumbled his way into creating a search engine almost by chance, pushed by two different forces—a government-funded research project and the rise of the Internet. Their work was funded by a project called the Digital Library Initiative, which started as an attempt by the Department of Defense to make it easier to find computer research papers electronically.
    DLI originally had nothing to do with the Internet, which in 1994 was not yet a major force in the digital world. Stanford’s original grant proposal to DLI that year didn’t even mention the Internet.
    But in 1994, Netscape Communications released its graphical Web browser, and the following year, the world suddenly had a system to archive and share anything, making DLI redundant. It was also the year that Yahoo Inc. was started. “The Internet completely changed things underneath us,” said Professor Hector Garcia-Molina, chair of Stanford’s Computer Science Department at the time. 1
    Whenever a new technology comes along, few people really figure out how to exploit it properly. Generally, it’s the second generation of companies that makes the real advances. That was true for search engines. Throughout the 1990s, search engines primarily retrieved pages according to how many times given key words were found on a site. These engines didn’t take advantage of the interconnected properties of the Internet other than that they could find sites and archive their information. The new technology that the Internet demanded did not yet exist. Larry created it.
    When Google’s search engine was officially launched in December