Who are Google's two founders? How did they meet and begin their collaboration at Stanford University?

The two founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Their story is quite interesting, almost like something out of a movie. They met in 1995 at Stanford University. At the time, Page was considering Stanford for his Ph.D., and Brin, already a student there, happened to be assigned to show him around campus.

It's said that they initially didn't see eye to eye and argued about almost everything. But despite their disagreements, they soon discovered a shared interest: how to quickly find the most useful information from the vast, chaotic early internet.

So, they began collaborating on a research project. The core idea of this project was revolutionary for its time: the importance of a webpage shouldn't just be judged by what it says, but more importantly, by how many "important" webpages link to it. This is similar to academia, where a paper's significance increases with the number of citations it receives, especially from authoritative journals.

This idea became the foundation of the famous "PageRank" algorithm. They built a search engine called "Backrub" using this algorithm, initially running it on Stanford's servers. The results were surprisingly good, far surpassing all other search engines on the market at the time.

Soon, the search engine became so popular that it overloaded the university's servers. They realized the immense potential of their creation and decided to put their Ph.D. studies on hold to start a company. In a friend's garage, they officially founded Google Inc. The rest, as they say, is history.