Sergey Brin: The Immigrant Who Organized the World's Information

The story of Google begins with a six-year-old boy on a plane leaving the Soviet Union. In 1979, Sergey Brin and his family emigrated from Moscow to the United States, leaving behind the anti-Semitic policies that had stifled his father's academic career and the surveillance state that had constrained his family's freedom. It is one of the great ironies of technology history that a boy who fled a society built on information control would grow up to create the most powerful information access tool the world has ever known.

Brin's mathematical genius was evident early. He breezed through the University of Maryland, earning his degree in mathematics and computer science, and was accepted into Stanford's Ph.D. program in computer science — one of the most competitive programs in the world. At Stanford, he was assigned to show a group of prospective students around campus. Among them was Larry Page, a University of Michigan graduate with strong opinions about everything. The two argued constantly during that first meeting. Within months, they were collaborating on a research project that would change the world.

The insight at the heart of Google was deceptively simple. Existing search engines in the mid-1990s ranked web pages based on how many times a search term appeared on the page — a system that was easily gamed and produced poor results. Brin and Page realized that the structure of the web itself contained information about page quality: specifically, the number and quality of links pointing to a page served as a signal of that page's importance, analogous to the way academic citations indicate the significance of a research paper. They called their algorithm PageRank (a play on Page's name), and it produced search results that were dramatically more relevant than anything else available.

The two built their first search engine in their Stanford dorm rooms, using so much bandwidth and storage that they briefly took down the university's internet connection. They incorporated Google on September 4, 1998, with seed funding of $100,000 from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim — who wrote the check before the company even had a bank account. The name "Google" was a play on "googol," the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros, reflecting the founders' mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information.

Brin's particular contributions to Google extended beyond the founding algorithm. His background in data mining led to early innovations in ad targeting and relevance. He championed the "20% time" policy that encouraged engineers to spend one-fifth of their work hours on personal projects — a policy that produced Gmail, Google News, and AdSense. And his intellectual restlessness led him to create Google X, the moonshot lab that would produce self-driving cars, delivery drones, and other technologies that seemed like science fiction when he proposed them. For Brin, who had arrived in America as a refugee with nothing, the idea that technology could solve the world's largest problems was not abstract idealism — it was personal.