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Search engines didn't really understand the notion of which pages were more important. If you typed "Stanford," you got random pages that mentioned Stanford. This obviously wasn't going to work.

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In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web - which pages link to which pages.

Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work.

You're going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it's going to change how we think about work. There's no way around that. You can't wish it away.

I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work.

Stanford would be first. You can take universities and just rank them, and they come out in the order you'd expect. So we thought, "This is really interesting. This thing really works. We should use it for search." So I started building a search engine.

The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job - that just doesn't make any sense to me. That can't be the right answer.