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Witness History

The founding of Google

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2020

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The world's most popular search engine was launched in September 1998 by two PHD students from Stanford University in California. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had an idea that would revolutionise the internet and create one of the world's most valuable companies. Farhana Haider has been speaking to Tamara Munzner a computer scientist who was at Stanford with the two founders of Google.

Photo Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2003. Credit Getty.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Cladie Aide.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:24.9

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.

0:30.9

Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

0:39.0

I'm Frahana Heather and today we go back to the early days of the world's most popular search engine, Google.

0:46.0

It was started at Stanford University in California by two PhD students.

0:51.0

I've been speaking to a computer scientist who was at

0:54.6

Stanford with the founders of Google. In the mid-1990s two Stanford post-grads had

1:02.4

an idea that would revolutionize the internet and create one of the world's most valuable companies.

1:08.0

Their names were Larry Page and Sergei Brin.

1:11.0

We always thought it had business potential, but at the time we were really focused on just

1:15.5

building great search engine and deploying it to as many people as possible.

1:19.0

Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful and I think

1:25.5

that would be a great thing for the world.

1:27.1

Tamara Munsner was a PhD student at Stanford with Paige and Bryn.

1:31.8

Larry smiled and laughed a lot on the goofy side,

1:36.1

you know, smart but goofy.

...

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