It was Larry Page who first hit on the idea of analyzing Internet links to rate their relevance to a given information search. At first Page was only interested in writing a fun and interesting dissertation, but he soon realized his idea had far greater potential. With his classmate Sergey Brin, he presented his work to acclaim at the World Wide Web conference in 1998. Within a year they had raised over $30 million to start a company, Google Inc., providing a free Web search service that can return an ordered list of results in a fraction of a second. The simple white page with the multi-colored logo was an immediate hit with Web surfers around the world. The web site generates enormous revenue by providing advertising space, linked by content to the results of a given search.