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Google Part I: Origins of Search

June 29, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

Google Part I: Origins of Search

The Unlikeliest Business Empire

In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, there were already a dozen search engines. AltaVista had a 16-million-page index. Yahoo was a $20 billion public company built on human curation. Excite, Lycos, InfoSeek, and Inktomi all had traffic, users, and business models. None of them were very good businesses, but they existed. The question that this episode answers is not how Google built a better search engine—it's how that better search engine became the single most profitable company in American history, generating more net income than Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, or Berkshire Hathaway.

Two Founders, One Obsession

Larry Page grew up in Lansing, Michigan, the son of two computer science professors. By age 12, he later said, "I knew I was going to start a company eventually." Sergey Brin was born in Moscow in 1973 to a mathematician father and a NASA researcher mother; the family emigrated when he was six. Both arrived at Stanford's PhD program in 1995, and their first meeting was electric—they literally shut down a bar in Menlo Park the night they met, with Charles Schwab picking up the tab.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Thesis** - Ben and David set up the Google saga, framing it as the story of the greatest business of all time and promising to answer why Google worked when a dozen other search engines failed.
  • 2 (04:40) **The Founders: Larry Page & Sergey Brin** - The episode introduces the founders, establishing their unique backgrounds and ambition to counter the "accidental success" narrative.
  • 3 (09:15) **The Meeting & The Idea** - Larry and Sergey meet at Stanford in 1995; their initial research project on web annotations leads to the breakthrough insight of PageRank.
  • 4 (23:34) **Backrub & The First Search Engine** - Larry and Sergey build the "Backrub" crawler and PageRank algorithm at Stanford, proving the concept works.
  • 5 (33:02) **Becoming Google & The Seed Round** - After failing to sell their technology, Larry and Sergey decide to build a search engine themselves, naming it "Google" and securing a legendary seed round.
  • 6 (48:15) **The State of Search in 1998** - The episode contextualizes Google's entry by describing the competitive landscape of AltaVista, Yahoo, and the portal model.
  • 7 (58:41) **Infrastructure Innovation** - Google's second major advantage was its revolutionary, cheap infrastructure built on commodity hardware and distributed computing.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Larry Page

Show Notes

We tell the story of the single greatest business ever created: Google search. From its origins as a Stanford research project called BackRub, Google became the front door to the internet. Today it’s an essential service for over half the world, and one that generates more profit than ANY other US company — more than Apple, Microsoft, or Berkshire Hathaway.

But it wasn’t always so obvious. When Larry and Sergey began working on BackRub in 1996, search was a backwater industry in silicon valley. Existing search companies were eking out a living as vendors to the then-dominant “portals” like AOL and Yahoo. Google’s come-from-behind success was the result of three massive step-function leaps forward in algorithms, infrastructure and business model… some invented by Google and some borrowed (and perfected!) by them.

Today, things are not so obvious once again for Google. Despite earning more profits than all of its big tech peers, its stock trades at significantly lower multiples — a $1 trillion or more discount to Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia. Investors are concerned that AI will render Google’s beautiful business model obsolete, even though Google also basically invented modern AI and continues to lead on many dimensions. This episode begins a multi-part series where we dive into the full history that led us to this point. Tune in and enjoy!

Update: when you finish, check out our Google Part II episode, "Alphabet, Inc."!

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