Page, whose father was a professor of computer science at Michigan State University, received a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan (1995) and entered into the doctorate program at Stanford, where he met Brin. The two were both intrigued with the idea of enhancing the ability to extract meaning from the mass of data accumulated on the Internet. Working from Page's dormitory room, they devised a new type of search engine technology that leveraged Web users' own ranking abilities by tracking each site's “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them.

In order to further their search engine, Page and Brin raised about $1 million in outside financing from investors, family, and friends. They called their expanded search engine Google—a name derived from a misspelling of the word googol (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). By September 1998 the two had founded Google Inc. The next year Google received $25 million of venture capital funding and was processing 500,000 queries per day. In 2000 Google became the search client for the Internet portal Yahoo!, and by 2004 the search engine was being utilized 200 million times a day. On Aug. 19, 2004, Google Inc. issued its initial public offering (IPO), which netted Page more than $3.8 billion. In an acquisition reflecting the company's efforts to expand its services beyond Internet searches, Google purchased in 2006 the most popular Web site for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock.