Ask anyone on the street who was the inventor of Google and they’ll usually stumble over a few names before landing on Larry and Sergey. It’s almost a legend now. Two PhD students at Stanford, a messy dorm room, and a wild idea to download the entire internet. But the reality of how Google actually came to be is a bit more chaotic than the "genius in a garage" myth we've all bought into. It wasn't just a lightbulb moment.
It was a grind.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't even like each other when they first met in 1995. Larry was looking at Stanford for grad school; Sergey was the guy assigned to show him around. They argued about everything. Literally everything. But by the next year, they were deep in a collaboration on a search engine they originally called BackRub. Yes, BackRub. Thankfully, they changed the name.
The math behind the man: Who was the inventor of Google really?
To understand who was the inventor of Google, you have to look past the brand and into the math. Specifically, PageRank. While we credit both men, Larry Page was the primary architect of the PageRank algorithm. He had this realization that the web was basically a giant graph of citations. In academia, if a paper is important, lots of other papers cite it. Larry thought, why not apply that to websites?
Sergey Brin, the math prodigy of the duo, jumped in to refine the data mining and make the system scale. They weren't just building a directory like Yahoo! was doing at the time. They were building a ranking system based on reputation. It was a massive shift in how information was organized.
They weren't trying to start a company at first. Honestly, they just wanted to finish their dissertations. They even tried to sell the technology to companies like Excite for about $750,000. Excite’s CEO, George Bell, turned them down. Talk about a bad day at the office in hindsight. Since nobody wanted to buy it, they had no choice but to make a go of it themselves.
The silent third partner: Scott Hassan
If you want to be a real tech trivia expert, you need to know the name Scott Hassan. While Larry and Sergey are the "official" founders, Hassan was the lead programmer for much of the original BackRub system. He wrote a lot of the code. He left before Google was officially incorporated to start his own path, which is why his name isn't on the billion-dollar checks today, but his fingerprints are all over the early architecture.
It's a reminder that "inventor" is often a collective noun.
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Moving from a dorm room to Susan’s garage
By 1998, the duo had maxed out their credit cards buying terabyte hard drives. They were clogging up the Stanford network. The university was, understandably, a bit annoyed.
They needed money.
They got their first big break from Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. After a quick demo on a porch in Palo Alto, he wrote a check for $100,000 made out to "Google Inc." The problem? Google Inc. didn't exist yet. It wasn't a legal entity. They had to scramble to incorporate the company just so they could deposit the check.
They ended up renting a garage from Susan Wojcicki (who later became the CEO of YouTube) for $1,700 a month. This is where the "who was the inventor of Google" story turns into a corporate reality. They hired their first employee, Craig Silverstein, a fellow Stanford grad student. The office was cramped. It smelled like a garage. But the search engine was already better than anything else on the market.
People were using it because it worked. No ads, no flashing banners, just a clean white page and results that actually made sense.
Why the name Google?
It’s a play on the word "googol." That’s a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It was meant to reflect their mission to organize the seemingly infinite amount of info on the web. Legend has it they checked if the domain was available, misspelled it as "https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com," and liked that version better. Or maybe the "https://www.google.com/search?q=googol.com" domain was already taken. Either way, the typo changed history.
The power dynamic: Page vs. Brin
Larry was the visionary, often described as aloof or intensely focused on the "big picture" of machine intelligence. Sergey was the outgoing, energetic force who pushed the boundaries of what the company could do socially and technologically.
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They complemented each other in a way that’s rare in business.
- Larry Page: Focused on the core search technology and later, "moonshots" like self-driving cars.
- Sergey Brin: Handled the business side early on and later moved into Google X, the lab for experimental projects.
- Eric Schmidt: The "adult supervision" brought in later to help the founders scale the company into a global powerhouse.
Without Schmidt, Google might have stayed a great search engine but failed as a business. But without Larry and Sergey's stubborn refusal to clutter the homepage, it wouldn't have been Google.
What most people get wrong about the invention
People think Google was the first search engine. It wasn't. Not even close.
AltaVista, Lycos, and Yahoo! were already giants. Google’s "invention" wasn't the act of searching; it was the act of filtering. Before Google, search engines looked for how many times a keyword appeared on a page. This led to "keyword stuffing," where people would just write "cheap shoes" 500 times in white text on a white background to trick the system.
Larry and Sergey realized that what people said about a page (via links) was more important than what the page said about itself. That insight is what made them the true inventors of the modern internet experience.
Real-world impact of the PageRank patent
Stanford University actually owned the patent for PageRank. In exchange for the exclusive license to use it, the university received shares in Google. When those shares were eventually sold, Stanford made over $300 million. It’s arguably one of the most successful tech transfers in academic history.
Actionable insights for the curious
If you're looking at the story of who was the inventor of Google and wondering how to apply that to your own life or business, here are a few takeaways that aren't just fluff:
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Focus on the "Why" of the link.
Google succeeded because it understood relationships. In your own networking or content creation, focus on who is vouching for you. Authority isn't claimed; it's delegated by others.
Don't fear the "BackRub" phase.
Your first version will probably be ugly. It might have a terrible name. The key is that the underlying logic (the algorithm) must be sound.
Find a foil.
Larry and Sergey were successful because they challenged each other. If you’re a visionary, find a refiner. If you’re a math whiz, find a storyteller.
The "Good Enough" trap.
Google wasn't just 10% better than AltaVista; it was 10x better. If you're entering a crowded market, marginal improvements won't save you. You need a fundamental shift in how the problem is solved.
Today, Google is Alphabet Inc., a massive conglomerate that does everything from life sciences to AI. But at its core, it’s still that same ranking algorithm developed by two guys who couldn't agree on a walking tour of Palo Alto. Larry Page and Sergey Brin took a messy, unorganized web and gave it a map. That’s why they remain the definitive answer to who was the inventor of Google, regardless of how many thousands of engineers have worked on the code since.
For anyone wanting to dive deeper into the technical papers, you can still find the original 1998 paper titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." It’s a fascinating read that shows just how much of the modern web was mapped out in a basement before the world even knew what "googling" meant.