By the mid-1990s, the web was drowning in pages and starving for a way to find anything useful. Newt tells how two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a better idea: rank pages by how the web itself linked to them. Their algorithm, PageRank, became Google—incorporated in a Menlo Park garage with a $100,000 check written to a company that didn't legally exist yet. From 10,000 daily searches to 8.5 billion today, this episode traces how an intellectual question about information became a two-trillion-dollar company, and a case study in curiosity preceding value.

<p>By the mid-1990s, the web was drowning in pages and starving for a way to find anything useful. Newt tells how two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a better idea: rank pages by how the web itself linked to them. Their algorithm, PageRank, became Google&mdash;incorporated in a Menlo Park garage with a $100,000 check written to a company that didn't legally exist yet. From 10,000 daily searches to 8.5 billion today, this episode traces how an intellectual question about information became a two-trillion-dollar company, and a case study in curiosity preceding value.</p>

Join Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Speaker of the House and Ph.D. historian, for the most diverse, informative, and entertaining podcast available. Every episode is an education.

<p>Join Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Speaker of the House and Ph.D. historian, for the most diverse, informative, and entertaining podcast available. Every episode is an education.</p>

Newt's World

Episode 1028: Greatest American Inventions — The Internet Search Engine

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/clips/7b4937eb-1e2c-4a61-9044-b49b012bd407/transcript