Google has played a major role in taking today’s information technology to new heights. Before the advent of AI chatbots, Google was the first choice for searching the internet. In the era of AI and increasing competition, Google has been continuously refining itself. For this reason, the services provided by the company’s products are highly preferred in the field of information technology.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin. According to the latest Forbes list, these two individuals are ranked second and third, respectively, among the world’s wealthiest people. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who has made significant investments in technology, is ranked first among the world’s richest.

Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. At the age of six, he moved to America with his parents. Brin has said that his family was compelled to come to America because of increasing persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union at that time. In 2017, after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order canceling the refugee program and banning citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., Brin actively participated in the protests. Wearing a brown vest and black jacket, Brin joined the demonstration at San Francisco airport in January 2017 and told journalists, “I am here because I am a refugee.”

After coming to America, Brin’s father, Michael Brin, taught mathematics at the University of Maryland. After graduating from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 1990, Sergey Brin also enrolled at the University of Maryland. He graduated with high marks in mathematics and computer science from College Park, under the university. Afterwards, he enrolled for a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford University on a National Science Foundation scholarship.

While at Stanford, Brin published more than a dozen academic research papers on data mining and pattern recognition. During this period, he also created a movie rating website called “Movie Ratings.” He developed software to convert TeX documents into HTML during this time as well.

It was at this university that he met Larry Page, who was studying computer engineering. Their friendship deepened while pursuing their PhDs. This meeting and friendship inspired both to do new things in the world of the internet. Page was studying how web pages are interconnected.

With Brin’s expertise in data mining, Larry tested and developed the “PageRank system.” Together, they prepared a research paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” This research is one of the most downloaded scientific documents in internet history.

Using ordinary personal computers in Larry’s dorm room, the two created the search engine “Backrub” in 1996. Then, in 1997, they registered the domain google.com. In 1998, they established Google as a private company. Taking a temporary leave from their PhD studies, both started operating the company from a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Their goal was to organize all the world’s information and make it easily accessible to everyone.

By 1999, Google had rented a campus with several buildings in Mountain View, California. This later became the company’s permanent headquarters, “Googleplex.”

Google’s search engine was fast. Because it provided as much relevant information as possible, the number of users kept increasing. As the business rapidly expanded, in 2001 Sergey and Larry appointed Eric Schmidt, former executive of Novell, as CEO. Along with this, Larry became head of the product department, Sergey head of the technology department, and Eric CEO, forming a three-person leadership team.

Innovation continued in the following years. In 2011, they launched the “Google Brain” project, aimed at developing a vast network capable of learning from visual, written, or audio content. In 2013, they unveiled “Google Glass,” a computer display operated by voice commands and integrated into eyeglasses. In 2015, Google was restructured into the holding company “Alphabet Inc.” Brin became the first president of Alphabet, while Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google.

At the end of 2019, Sergey and Larry stepped down from their executive roles at Alphabet, handing over the CEO responsibilities of both Google and Alphabet to Sundar Pichai. However, both co-founders remain on Alphabet’s board of directors. They still hold the largest shares and ownership in the company.

After stepping down from executive roles, Sergey focused his attention on personal projects and philanthropic work. He has donated more than $2 billion for Parkinson’s disease research. However, by 2023, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and

increasing competition brought Sergey back into Google’s daily operations. At that time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 was posing a significant challenge to Google. Sergey worked closely with AI researchers. He played a role in bringing skilled personnel into the company and was actively involved in the development of Google’s main AI system, “Gemini.”