2026-08-10
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 August 10, 2026, I pasted infolab.stanford.edu/~page/ and ~sergey/ into a terminal. Both returned 200. Page's is titled 'Lawrence or Larry Page's Page'; it lists him as a Ph.D. Student, office Gates 360, phone (650) 330-0100, and one line of body text: Currently working on Google, a search engine for the Web. Brin's says Currently I am at Google and In fall '98 I taught CS 349, with a paper co-authored with Page marked Work in progress. Twenty-eight years, not one edit. Meanwhile one of them is now at Google almost every day helping train Gemini, and the other crossed $300 billion in net worth on April 30 this year and went off to do AI manufacturing. This piece is about the thing product managers most reliably overestimate: how they describe a project on the day it starts.
