9781422270424

Russia in pursuit of a better life. At first, Michael’s wife, Genia, did not want to leave. What ultimately caused his wife to agree to leave the country was the thought of Brin’s future. She realized that he would have a better life in another country. Brin’s parents decided to move their family to the United States so he would be able to pursue any education he wanted to. Michael had already taught himself some basic computer programming before leaving Russia. He passed what he learned on to his son, who was a natural at it. Sergey tinkered with computers throughout his childhood and even began writing simple programs of his own. Brin’s father also taught his son about the importance of mathematics. Brin went on to study computer science and mathematics in college. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and went to Stanford University for his graduate studies. Page and Brin bumped into each other in March 1995 during a meeting for new PhD students. Brin was trying to find an interesting project to work on and became intrigued by what Page was doing. While Page was concerned with the links that connected web pages, Brin was more interested in the data that made up each web page. Their two areas of focus turned out to be perfect for the beginnings of a search engine. They wrote a paper together about their research explaining how a powerful search engine could work, and soon they started programming a search engine very much like the one they had written about. One of the first projects they worked on was known as BackRub, where they built a computer program for searching the Internet. The amount of information they were

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