It all began with a meeting of minds

SERGEY Brin and Larry Page met in 1995, when they were respectively 23 and 24, at a spring gathering for new Stanford University PhD computer science graduates.

Reportedly they did not hit it off arguing robustly on every subject. But by the end of the year they were working together on the technology that would power Google.

From January 1996 to December 1997, aside from their studies, they created BackRub, the precursor to Google. By 1998 Page's campus room was Google's data centre and Brin's the business office.

Both put their PhDs on hold and raised $1m from friends and family. Supposedly, a $100,000 cheque from Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim was made out to Google Inc, so they had to incorporate the company in September 1998. The engine was then handling 10,000 queries a day.

During the first half of 1999, Google's staff grew to eight and it answered 500,000 searches a day.

It raised $25m from venture capitalists and in August moved to its present headquarters in Mountain View, California, with 39 staff. The number of searches hit 3m a day.

During 2000, Google became the largest search engine on the web, answering 18m questions a day, and was voted best search engine by all the top computer magazines.

Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive of Novell, became chairman and then chief executive of Google in 2001. Page and Brin became presidents of products and technology respectively.

Page, son of a Michigan State University computer science professor, says his interest in computers began at the age of six. He later built an inkjet printer with Lego.

Brin is the Moscow-born son of a Russian mathematician, Michael Brin, who, before he emigrated in 1979, often argued how much more successful Leonid Brezhnev's communist State was than the US.