Spanish
On September 4, 1998, two Stanford doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated a company with a seemingly modest goal: "to put order" on the web. Their tool, PageRank, interpreted each hyperlink as a vote of quality and recursively calculated the relevance of millions of pages. That idea, born from the BackRub project and embodied in an academic paper, redefined search and access to information on the internet.
Page (East Lansing, 1973) grew up in a home of computer science professors; he studied at the University of Michigan before starting his doctorate at Stanford, where he met Brin. Sergey Brin (Moscow, 1973) emigrated as a child to the USA; he trained in Mathematics and Computer Science in Maryland and then at Stanford. Both temporarily abandoned their doctorates to build Google and, years later, reorganized the group under Alphabet.
You may be interested in: Google tries again with smart glasses
How did the innovation work? PageRank was born as a "citation" reading of the web: valuable pages receive links from other valuable ones; the algorithm weighs that network and produces a stable ranking, more resistant to spam than the methods of the time. It is, in essence, bibliometrics applied to hypertext. In the current situation, the judge and the “new measures”. In the most important antitrust case against the company since its creation, Judge Amit Mehta confirmed that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in search, but in his ruling on remedies (September 2025) avoided structural measures such as forcing a sale of Chrome or splitting the business. Instead, he imposed prohibitions on exclusivity agreements for default search and obligations to share certain data with rivals including AI companies, in order to facilitate competition; the Department of Justice celebrated the package as “significant remedies”. Critics called it a “slap on the wrist”, but acknowledge that it sets limits on distribution contracts and opens the door to more data interoperability. In an article from AL DÍA News it underlines the symbolism of the case with an immigrant judge who does not break Google but reconfigures the playing field in search and AI with behavioral and data measures. The coverage also recalls that the company faces parallel fronts (advertising, Play Store) and that, as in the Microsoft era, the changes can be gradual but lasting. Al Día News At 27 years old, Google continues to oscillate between two narratives: that of the engineering feat that turned links into knowledge, and that of the platform power that regulators are trying to contain. Page and Brin wanted to "order" the web; now, judges and authorities seek to order Google. The most competitive outcome in search and AI, without dismantling the giant, will mark the chapter that begins today.
