Creative Execution: What Great Leaders Do to Unleash Bold Thinking and Innovation

How Google Got Its Groove

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin met in the summer of 1995, the Internet was still rather inchoate. But for the two PhD students from Stanford University, it was an enigma to be cracked. The rapidly growing number of web pages were connected to each other through links that were difficult to organize in order of importance, and made Internet search a tedious, unpredictable proposition. As Randall Stross explains, searching the web for accurate results “was considered by almost everyone in the business to be uninteresting, a behind-the-scenes service that could be obtained from any of a number of fungible suppliers.”⁴ The leading search engine at the time, AltaVista, had just over 50 percent of the Internet-search market, ...