Google
It all started with a dream by Larry Page, a PhD student at Stanford University. His dream was simply to invent something one day (Hanley, 2003). But little did he know that with some effort and collaboration of work with Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, he was about to revolutionise the world of technology and own the ‘world’s best search engine’ (Google, 2008).
History of Google
In 1996 Larry Page started working on a research project as a part of his PhD thesis. The research was to find a new method of searching for web pages on the internet (Lenssen, 2007). He based his idea on a concept he developed called PageRank, a numerical value that represents the popularity of a webpage by checking the number of links that other pages have to it. The logic behind it being the more links that are cast on a page, the more important the page must be (Craven, 2008).
Larry’s first ‘wacky’ idea of wanting to download the whole internet onto his computer shows signs of a great entrepreneur in the making. He further emphasised this point during a convention at an Israeli high school where he talked about ‘having a healthy disregard for the impossible’ (Vise, 2005). The underlying meaning to this phrase being imagination should never be kept in boundaries; a core concept that has always been utilised by great entrepreneurs and is currently encouraged in all entrepreneurship modules.
On the other hand, Sergey Brin had keen interest in data mining. Sergey using help from his advisor, Rajeev Motwani started research on dynamic data mining. The model behind this was to use specific algorithms to sift through vast amounts of data and pick out relevant information (Frawley et al., 1992). This was a continuation to the project started by Larry Page called Page-Rank which brought these two computer geniuses to work together. Finally they came up with a working prototype for Stanford University called BackRub (Poole et al., 2005) BackRub was an instant hit with...