© 2026 South Carolina Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
SC Public Radio's statewide network is experiencing intermittent outages and programming issues due to ongoing infrastructure upgrades. Our team is working to keep these disruptions to a minimum and to resolve issues that do arise. Streaming on this site, the SCETV App, the NPR App, and smart speakers is unaffected.

Search Engine Wars: Google's Cinderella Story

In the 1990s, Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page figured out how to use the structure of the Internet — the way pages link to one another — to put the most relevant items at the top of a search list. Their discovery transformed their garage startup, Google, into the Internet's top search engine, a household name and even a verb. NPR's Rick Karr reports.

Copyright 2004 NPR

Tags
Rick Karr contributes reports on the arts to NPR News. He is a correspondent for the weekly PBS public affairs show Bill Moyers Journal and teaches radio journalism at Columbia University.