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Google graduates
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October 20, 1998: 10:08 p.m. ET
Search-engine startup hopes to succeed by rating Web pages' importance
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SAN FRANCISCO (The Red Herring) - Stanford University should start a department of search engine technology.
The last couple of times Stanford grad students experimented with technology to search and categorize the Web, Yahoo (YHOO) and Excite (XCIT) were born. They're now both companies with multibillion-dollar market capitalizations.
The university has just spawned a third search engine company, Google.
The infant startup is hoping to follow in its fellow alumni's footsteps, with new technology that sorts Web search results by the number of other "important" sites linking to each page.
It might be a long journey, but the month-old company has just taken its first steps by securing seed funding from a number of private investors, including Andy Bechtolsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems (SUNW) and former CEO of Granite.
Asserting rank
Google refused to disclose how much funding it had raised, who its other investors were, or how it planned to make money, but it did say it was planing a launch for the "near future."
The startup has made no announcements and wants to "keep a low profile" for the next month, according to Google cofounder Larry Page, a graduate student at Stanford.
Bechtolsheim was also reluctant to talk about the funding: "I'll just say that this is a brand new search technology, in a very hot area."
Google is based on three years of research by Page and cofounder Sergey Brin, which produced PageRank, a system that crawls the Web, and according to Page, "analyzes hyperlinks to find out what is important and what people like."
He said the system used a mathematical formula to determine a site's importance and ranking, based on the principle that "you are important if important pages point to you." For example, a link from Yahoo raises a page's rank.
"It's quite complicated and sounds circular, but we've worked out a way of calculate a Web site's importance," Mr. Page said.
The researchers claim their technology provides an objective measure that corresponds with people's subjective belief of the way Web pages should be ranked.
Google currently has more than 25 million indexed pages and hopes to raise that to 100 million. Researchers estimate there are currently over 300 million publicly indexable pages on the Web.
Goggle is not the only startup developing new ways to search the Web. Rapid advances in technology and Web proliferation has created great demand for new solutions for effective searching.
Direct Hit has produced technology that tracks millions of Internet searches and records which pages users visit from a list of results. The data is then used to determine which pages are popular and which are not, and Direct Hit ranks them accordingly. The six-month-old startup received $1.4 million in a first round from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in May.
Another search engine system, Clever, is being developed at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Like Google, it ranks pages by calculating links between them and measuring "importance," but it does not crawl the Web. Instead it uses indices built by other programs to find either "authorities," Web sites that offer specific information, or "hubs," compilations of those sites.
Page said search engine technology would continue to improve and that Google was primarily motivated by exploring that technology.
"We started this company because we were unhappy with current search technology," he said. "If we are successful, that will just be a great side effect."
Playing hooky
"Google" is a misspelling of "googol," 10 to the 100th power.
"We chose it because we deal with huge amounts of data," says Page. "Besides, it sounds really cool."
Page and Brin are taking time off from their graduate degrees to focus on the company, and have no plans to return, they said.
"People leave (their university studies) because of tremendous opportunities. They don't usually go back."
Fellow alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo certainly didn't, though Excite's cofounders managed to graduate before launching their company. With Yahoo's lead on Excite, one might see an argument against higher education -- but it's clear Stanford is still in the business of graduating startups. 
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