Episode 1028: Greatest American Inventions — The Internet Search Engine

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…