Birth of Google

Wired has an interesting article about the origins of Google at Stanford University. Turns out Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the original system in their dorm rooms. The interesting part, to me, is how Google's original structure actually mirrors a real world phenomanon - source citations in acadamic journal articles.

The other interesting point is that two academics, from academic backgrounds, fell into a business together almost by accident.

A funny quote (BackRub was the name of the project from which Google grew):

The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.