Google: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Craig Silverstein, Paul Buchheit

It is currently possible for a university research project to store and process the entire World Wide Web. Since there is a limit on how much text humans can generate, it is plausible that within a few decades one will be able to store and process all the human-generated text on the Web in a shirt pocket.

Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a
given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this
idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page.

While Bechtolsheim describes himself and Cheriton as “accidental investors,” others have downplayed the role of sheer luck. "“It'’s not accidental at all",” says Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s ubiquitous angel investor whom Cheriton introduced to Google for a later investment. “"It’'s because of the environment that they’'ve built around them. They'’re such smart and astute engineers that they attract other engineers to share their ideas with them.”"
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His standards are extremely high,” says Liang, whose research meetings with Cheriton were the most nerve-­racking part of his week. “He tells you, ‘"You have to think big. You have to make an impact in the world.’”"
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Cheriton says he avoids pursuing market whims–he considers social networking one of them–and stays focused on breakthroughs that make measurable improvements to human life, such as the way Google helps a college junior complete a research paper at 3 a.m. He says he has “a belief that if you are providing real value to the world and doing it in a sensible way, then the market rewards you.”

It was 17 years ago that he showed the world his Internet search engine. Sitting in the audience at an Internet conference in Santa Clara, California, when Marchiori unveiled the breakthrough, was a student, four years younger than the speaker, who listened with rapt attention. That guy was Larry Page, and he hadn't yet invented Google with his Stanford University friend, Sergey Brin.

Marchiori's project was called Hyper Search, a system able to scan the Web with a level of accuracy never seen before. Hyper Search was based on an innovative algorithm many developers consider to be an inspiration for PageRank, Google's magic formula that sorts Web pages by counting the number and quality of links to each from around the Internet. Before Marchiori's project, tools that aimed to bring order to the chaos of cyberspace were classified using textual information and not their "Web-structure," which naturally includes links.

"When I finished my presentation, a gentle boy approached me saying he found it very interesting," Marchiori says in a phone interview.

The boy was Page, who then spent the day with Marchiori, discussing the future of Internet. When it was time to say goodbye, Page told his new Italian friend: "Man, I would like to develop your idea further," according to Marchiori. Page kept his promise.

After the speech, Marchiori returned home in the hopes of realizing his ambitious design. "When I came back to Italy, I asked the university for 20,000 euros to develop a search engine, but instead, they financed a project about the history of copper metallurgy in Italy," he says. Meanwhile, Page got his first $100,000 check from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. A spokeswoman for Google in Milan declined to comment.

Marchiori looked for a research job in Italian academia but opted to move to the U.S. instead. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he spent seven years working with Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web.

Two years ago, Marchiori began working on a new kind of search engine called Volunia. This was a "social search-based network" designed to share interests and queries using a three-dimensional interface. Search results were delivered as digital maps with buildings, streets and highways, similar to the game SimCity. The most relevant responses were represented, for example, as the tallest skyscrapers. Users who had posted the same question were linked by virtual streets.

Volunia flopped, after a shareholder dispute led to a lawsuit. Marchiori says he retains the patent rights and plans to soon retrieve the source code from a liquidator in Milan. He expects to open-source the project and release it to developers for free. Pieces of Volunia could be useful for devising new algorithms or creating large-scale messaging networks, he says.

Marchiori, now 44, says he isn't jealous of Page's success.

"I am happy to have in some way contributed to Google's birth," he says. "Larry and Sergey have had the immense persistence to transform an idea into an industrial project changing everyone's lives."

Anchor: Is this, in a way, Glass 2.0 for Google?

Correspondent: Yeah, very much so. It's both on a product perspective and strategy-wise, it's gonna be a big departure from the way they've been developing this wearable device in the past.

Anchor: Now, there have been some changes in the way that they're going to be dealing with new products, that are quite quite different from what they've done before.

Correspondent: Yeah, so Google has mostly been a software company in the past, so it liked to, with something with like Gmail it released that software to hundreds of thousands of people to try it out first, and then if there were any bugs they would update it and fix them, so it's been trying to do that kind of thing with hardware as well, and obviously doing that with hardware is a lot more difficult, and that's what they tried to do with Glass and it backfired.

Anchor: It certainly did backfire. So it's going to be a bit more like Apple, which perfects and perfects and perfects as much as they can, and then when they think they've got it as good as it can be, then it goes out to the public.

Correspondent: Yeah that's right, there's some real risk of potential damage to a brand if you put some gadget out there that a lot of people have paid for and are trying to use and it doesn't work very well. And so Apple only releases iPhones and other gadgets when they're absolutely ready, and basically Google Glass is now going to go into a hole this year and they're going to try to emerge with a product that is ready to go, whereas the first one was really a prototype with a lot of glitches.