They Organized the World's Information. Their Own Homepages Stopped in 1998 — and Still Say They're 'Currently Working on Google, a Search Engine for the Web'

On the morning of August 10, 2026, I pasted these two addresses into a terminal:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/     200
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/   200

Both alive. Two graduate students’ homepages, still sitting on a Stanford server, twenty-eight years on.

Page’s says “Ph.D. Student” and gives a 1998 office phone number

The page is titled “Lawrence or Larry Page’s Page.” What follows is copied verbatim:

Larry (Lawrence) Page Ph.D. Student Computer Science Department Stanford University

Member of Terry Winograd’s Project on People, Computers, and Design.

Currently working on Google, a search engine for the Web. Papers and a demo are available off this page.

email: [email protected] office: Gates 360 phone: (650) 330-0100

Present tense. Papers and a demo are available off this page. The office number and the landline are still there.

Brin’s page reads the same way:

Sergey Brin’s Home Page Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford — [email protected]

Research Currently I am at Google. In fall ‘98 I taught CS 349.

Below that is his data mining work and a list of papers. One of them, co-authored with Lawrence Page, is titled Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality, and carries this note:

We describe a new architecture for data mining (sorry not yet available online). Work in progress.

Another is marked “To appear in VLDB ‘98.”

That sentence was worth one line, next to a data mining paper

The tone of those two pages is the whole point.

“Currently working on Google, a search engine for the Web” carries exactly the same weight on that page as “In fall ‘98 I taught CS 349.” A doctoral student’s status list: I’m with Terry Winograd’s group, I taught a course in the fall, I do data mining, I’m building a search engine.

No vision. No mission. No organizing the world’s information. That line came later.

The thing product managers most reliably overestimate is their own description of a project on the day it starts. We’re trained to write down what this will change, as if failing to say it means we haven’t thought hard enough. And the thing that actually changed the world was, on the day it began, worth one line on its author’s own homepage — sitting beside a fall course listing.

This is not an argument that vision is useless. It’s that how you narrate something at the start has almost no relationship to how large it turns out to be. Twenty-eight years later, the restraint of that one line reads as accurate: in 1998 Google really was a demo and a few papers.

Ranked 7th: business 98, scale 99, insight only 90

I had Claude score “the 100 product managers who changed the world”. Page and Brin share one entry at 7th, OVR 95, across six dimensions:

Scale 99 and business 98 sit in the top bracket of the whole board. One input box absorbed humanity’s demand for information and defined the internet’s business model for twenty years along the way. Nothing to argue with there.

The other two are conspicuously low. Insight 90 and taste 86 both rank last within the top ten. Allen Zhang’s insight is 99. Miyamoto’s taste is 99. Jobs is above 98 on both.

That distribution says something quite specific: they did not win by understanding users better than anyone else. PageRank grew out of a paper — ranking pages by the citation structure of links is an academic judgment. The product decision they actually got right was turning an academic algorithm into a business, and getting it onto every device on earth.

In this profession those are two different talents.

Twenty-eight years on: Brin is in the office almost daily, Page went to the factory

The two people who wrote those pages have gone in different directions.

Brin stepped back from Alphabet’s day-to-day operations in December 2019, then came back. He has said publicly that staying retired would have been a “big mistake,” that during that stretch he felt he was “spiralling” and “a bit less sharp.” By 2023 he was at the office three or four times a week, working alongside researchers. More recently he says he is at Google “pretty much every day now,” helping train the latest Gemini models. He has also said, more bluntly, that it is time for retired computer scientists to get back to work.

A 52-year-old who never needs to earn another dollar went back to do something as concrete as training models.

Page did not go back. He is building a company called Dynatomics — AI generates optimized product designs, factories build them. It is led by Chris Anderson, formerly CTO of Kitty Hawk, the flying car company Page also backed. On December 30, 2025, he filed to move the company’s registration from California to Keller, Texas, while leasing 73,400 square feet of R&D space in Palo Alto, keeping the core engineering there.

On April 30, 2026, after Alphabet reported surging cloud revenue, Forbes’ real-time list pushed Page’s net worth past $300 billion, second in the world.

One went back to the place his 1998 homepage still describes. The other went off to do something else entirely. And both pages still say Ph.D. Student.

All I did today was run two curls

What I build is several orders of magnitude smaller, but the feeling transfers.

Open the earliest README of your own project and you’ll find phrasing that was meant to be temporary — “for now,” “we’ll handle that case later.” Some of it got fixed. Some of it stayed, because it turned out to be accurate the whole time.

Page’s page may still be up simply because nobody maintains that server. But the effect of reading it is something else entirely: it preserves, intact, what a thing looked like at the beginning — including how much its author underrated it.

We write project proposals big because we’re trying to convince someone. Those two pages are the proof that how you describe it on day one and what it becomes are two independent lines.

On August 10, 2026, both addresses still return 200. They say Ph.D. Student, Gates 360, (650) 330-0100, and one sentence in the present tense about currently working on a search engine for the Web.

(All scores and rankings in this piece were produced by Claude, an AI; methodology is on the rankings page.)