6 Google’s early success is often attributed to Page-Rank, the search algorithm developed by Larry Page while he and his cofounder, Sergey Brin, were graduate students at Stanford. But the slim, square-jawed, classically handsome Dean, who spoke with a polite shyness and a slight lisp, was just as important to the company’s rapid rise—if not more so. He and a handful of other engineers built the sweeping software systems that underpinned the Google search engine, systems that ran across thousands of computer servers and multiple data centers, allowing PageRank to instantly serve millions of
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