<P> Google began in 1995 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Ph. D. students at Stanford University . </P> <P> In the search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering--among other things--exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph . His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). </P>

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