All Eyes on Google

Google was launched less than four years ago by two graduate students in computer science: one, a Russian émigré named Sergey Brin, now 29; the other, a Michigan-reared engineer named Larry E. Page, now all of 30. As a gateway to 3 billion Web pages, Google is a strangely unadorned site: 37 words, four tabs and a blank space where you type in a query of up to 10 words. Google's over 10,000 networked Google computers crawl through an index to those 3 billion pages, rank them with an equation that includes 500 million variables and spit out up to a few thousand listings. The ranking takes 500 milliseconds; the computers can handle a peak rate equal to 7 million queries per hour.