Technology History | Gates Building, Stanford — The Patent Behind Google Belongs to the University

The crawler that became Google set out from a single web page in 1996: Larry Page's own Stanford home page.

It was called BackRub, after the back links it followed, and it was built in the Gates Computer Science Building, which had opened that January.

Page shared room 360 with several other graduate students. By the account of David Koller, a colleague from the same wing, one of those officemates, Sean Anderson, was checking whether "googol" was free as a domain during a September 1997 naming session, mistyped it, and the misspelling became the company.

The idea underneath the name proved more durable. PageRank treated a hyperlink as an endorsement and weighted each endorsement by the standing of the page giving it, so a link from a serious site counted for more than a link from a hobby page.

Stanford filed a provisional patent application on the method on 10 January 1997, and the full application on 9 January 1998.

It issued as US Patent 6,285,999, with Lawrence Page named as sole inventor.

That patent has never belonged to Google. It is assigned to Stanford University, which granted the company an exclusive licence in exchange for 1.8 million shares.

The university sold 184,207 of those shares in the 2004 offering for US$15.7 million and the rest over the following year, realising US$336 million in total.

Katherine Ku, who ran Stanford's licensing office, confirmed the figure at the time, noting it worked out to an average of about US$187 a share.

Brin and Page described the whole system in April 1998 at the seventh World Wide Web conference, under a title that undersold it: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Visitors can see the recognition. On 20 May 2024 the IEEE dedicated a Milestone for PageRank and the birth of Google, and one of its three plaques sits in a glass case in this building's fourth-floor foyer, beside the plaque for TCP.

The building is open to the public on weekdays, 8am to 6pm; the nearest visitor parking is the Roth Way Garage.

Sources: IEEE Milestone documentation (ETHW); US Patent 6,285,999; Stanford Office of Technology Licensing; contemporary reporting on the 2005 share sale. Cover photo: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.