The report was viral. The press heralded it. Companies downloaded more than a hundred thousand copies from Morgan Stanley’s Web site. HarperCollins published it as a book. Within days, Meeker received an e-mail from someone who lived at Three Lighthouse Road in New Zealand -to thank her. “He had a dial-up Web connection and he was able to connect to me from a remote location,” she recalled. “This was the power of the Internet. That was a magical moment, for it represented what the report was about.” Barron’s would dub Meeker “Queen of the Internet.” Wireless communications were exploding, and that year Americans spent twenty-two billion dollars on wireless services, as telephone companies and others vied to buy spectrum space that would speed the digital revolution.

Also that year, Nathan Myhrvold wrote a memo to Bill Gates in which he drew a distinction between incremental changes (like CD-ROMs or computers that double in speed every year) and “revolutionary” sea changes. He predicted computers that would be connected to networks, opening markets for e-commerce, information services, and video on demand; a “shift from a products business to a service business” that will allow services to be downloaded rather than sold in packages, opening the possibility that software companies like Microsoft would be able to charge per transaction; and new multimedia platforms that would permit the transmission of CD- quality audio and crisp video pictures. He also predicted there would be a radical change as we “move to an intelligent operating system,” an intelligent agent or navigator that would free consumers to locate what they want on their PC or the Web.

It was at places like Stanford and in classes like Terry Winograd’s that these systems might be designed. To tug his computer science students down from their theoretical heights and ground them in a sense of “how things work and an understanding of the user,” Winograd assigned them to read Donald A. Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. The thesis of Norman ’s book is that those who design things-from video recorders to computers to impossible-to-open plastic packages-typically don’t design from the vantage point of consumers. Thus they make products that are overly complicated and confusing. This, he wrote, is “the paradox of technology: added functionality generally comes along at the price of added complexity.”

This idea became an obsession of Larry’s. Years later, he called it a “seminal” book, and remembered being amazed when he first read it “that people are so focused on outside things and are not focused on the functionality of things.” (It still drives him mad to stay in a hotel and not be able to figure out how to turn the lights off “in less than three minutes.”) The book, he said, strengthened the attitude he brought to designing the Google search engine, which was the opposite approach from existing search engines like Alta Vista. If you did a search for university on Alta Vista, it heaved at you every text that contained the word university, without ranking value or assessing whether people were actually using the links. Doing the same search, Google relied on the collective intelligence of its users and returned with the top ten universities. Thinking that “your customer or users are always right, and your goal is to build systems that work for them in a natural way, is a good attitude to have,” Page said. “You can replace the system. You can’t replace the user.”

Page and Brin wanted to build an efficient search engine, one that didn’t waste users’ time. Efficient use of time was paramount for them. Neither Page nor Brin eagerly read novels or went to many movies or concerts, and they disdained games like golf that took too long to play. Once, during the early days of Google, Time magazine had arranged to photograph Sergey in a white lab coat. When the photo shoot ran over the allotted time, Sergey abruptly called out, “Red alert,” and simply walked away without explanation.

Page and Brin together, it was said, were “two swords sharpening each other.” They were not breathtakingly more brilliant than their peers, said Winograd, observing that brilliance is commonplace among top Stanford engineering students. What was unusual about them, he said, was their boldness. “Page and Brin’s breakthrough,” writes Battelle in The Search, his book on the history of search, “was to create an algorithm-dubbed PageRank after Larry-that manages to take into account the number of links into a particular site, and the number of links into each of the linking sites.” Instead of relying only on keywords as earlier search engines had, PageRank did a link analysis, counting the sites that were most frequently visited by users and jumping them to the top of the search results. They believed this “wisdom of crowds” approach was a more objective way of measuring which Web pages were most vital. The goal was to get better answers to search queries. They understood one big thing: They were establishing a formula that would harness the growth of their search engine to the growth of the Web. What they needed was massive computing power to conduct lightning-fast searches, and huge servers to store the millions of indexed Web pages.

In 1996, Larry Page’s father, a polio victim as a child, died of pneumonia. He was only fifty-eight. Bereft, Page threw himself into his project. To crawl and index the Web required enormous amounts of Stanford’s computer system, and Page and Brin were not shy about using it. Together, he and Brin harassed the computer science department to grant them extra resources. Terry Winograd, who worked on the project, recalled that “they had more of a feel of teenage kids than most graduate students-‘Don’t tell me what to do!’” Professor Rajeev Motwani, who also worked on the project, said, “They didn’t have this false respect for authority. They were challenging me all the time. They had no compunction in saying to me, ‘You’re full of crap!”’ He recalled, “The fondest memory I have of Sergey is of him walking into my office when I was sitting at my desk and he would say, ‘Bastard!’ That was the kind of thing he would do. Larry was sitting outside. It was a joke. But behind the joke was that he wanted something from me: more computer time.”

Once, Winograd said, they snuck onto the loading dock where new Stanford computers were delivered and “borrowed” them to expand their computing power. Page and Brin brought a cart to transport the crates. Some years later, Page confessed that their embryonic search engine in 1997 hogged so much computer capacity that “we caused the whole Stanford network to go down.”

The new search engine, at first called BackRub, was an object of some secrecy. Spurred by Page’s obsession with Tesla, who unwittingly gave away his inventions by sharing them with others, Page and Brin zealously guarded the algorithms that created PageRank. But as Ph.D. candidates, they were expected to present their work, so to satisfy Stanford’s academic requirements they agreed to deliver a paper in January 1998. At the time it wasn’t clear whether they wanted to be entrepreneurs or academics. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page said. “We wanted to finish school,” as their fathers had. Page remembered the words of Stanford professor Jeffrey Ullman, who urged them to leave the university: “You guys can always come back and finish your Ph.D.’s if you don’t succeed.” This argument ultimately proved persuasive, but not before the paper was delivered.

The database they discussed consisted of 24 million Web pages; a typical search took one to ten seconds. They chose the name Google to replace BackRub because, they said, “it is a common spelling of googol, or 10¹⁰⁰ and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.” (Actually, they wanted to name it Googol but that domain name was taken. They also thought of The Whatbox, Brin said a few years later, but “we decided that Whatbox sounded like Wetbox, which sounded like some sort of porn site.”) Their paper stated that their search technology offered “two important features that help it produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank… Second, Google utilizes” links-518 million hyperlinks at the time-to make maps that “allow rapid calculation of a web page’s ‘PageRank.’” They presented some calculations to describe how they approximated “a page’s importance or quality.”