Google

Why do so many of the world’s most famous companies come from the same university? Walk Around This Campus and You’ll See Something Strange Imagine walking through Stanford University on a sunny California afternoon. You pass a building where two PhD students once argued late into the night about the best way to organize the entire internet — they went on to create Google. A few minutes later, you walk past a dorm room where a college kid sketched out an app that would let photos disappear after ten seconds — that became Snapchat. Down the road, there’s a spot where four students got tired of not being able to order food delivery, so they built an app and started driving the meals themselves — that became DoorDash. ...

Google organized all the world’s information. But what if computers could do more than find answers — what if they could actually understand them? The Bigger Dream By the 2010s, Google had become part of daily life for billions of people. Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android — Google’s products touched almost every part of how humans use the internet. But Larry Page and Sergey Brin had always dreamed bigger than search. From the very beginning, they believed that organizing information was just the first step. The real goal was to make computers truly intelligent. ...

Google started by helping you find things. Then it started building things nobody had even dreamed of yet. The Money Problem By the early 2000s, Google was the world’s favorite search engine. Millions of people used it every day. But there was a big problem: Google wasn’t making any money. Running a search engine is incredibly expensive. Every time someone types a question into Google, thousands of computers work together to find the answer in a fraction of a second. Those computers need electricity, cooling, buildings to live in, and engineers to take care of them. All of that costs a fortune. ...

What if the entire internet was a giant messy room — and two college students figured out how to organize it? The World’s Biggest Mess Imagine a library with billions of books. But there’s no librarian. No catalog. No signs on the shelves. Every time you need to find something, you just wander around and hope you get lucky. That’s what the internet was like in the mid-1990s. Websites were popping up everywhere — thousands of new ones every day. But finding what you actually needed? Nearly impossible. The “search engines” that existed back then were terrible. You’d type in a question and get a list of random, useless pages. It was like asking for directions and getting a phone book thrown at your face. ...