Sergey Brin and Larry Page met in grad school at Stanford in the mid-'90s, and in 1996 started working on a search technology based around a new idea: that relevant results come from context. Their technology analyzed the number of times a given website was linked to by other sites — assuming that the more links, the more relevant the site — and ranked sites accordingly. Despite being a late entrant to the search game, it now rules the web.

Brin and Page's innovation-friendly office culture has spun out lucrative new products including AdSense/AdWords, Google News, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Gmail, as well as the Android mobile operating system. Now, led by Brin, Google is pursuing problems beyond the page, like the driverless car and the digital eyewear known as Google Glass .