Google truth, the truth of Google’s birth from googletruth on Vimeo.

Just as Google is celebrating its 10th anniversary, a man claiming to be the “third” founder of Google has come out to stake his claim to history. In the video above, a man calling himself Hubert Chang claims that as an NYU Ph.D student in 1997 he was introduced to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani. He then helped the two come up with PageRank (the underlying algorithm that powers Google’s search engine), the name Google, and even the business plan.

So why wasn’t his name on the original PageRank paper? Because, he says, he decided to pursue his Ph.D instead. Then when he did finish his Ph.D n 2002 and contacted Google, he got the big brush off from Larry and Sergey’s handlers. (Surprise, surprise). Remember, boys and girls, always ask for a byline.

Is any of this true? I have no idea. It could be a hoax. But emails into professor Motwani, Google, and Hubert Chang asking for more details. By his own account, though, it sounds like Chang walked away from Google because he thought it wouldn’t amount to much. His mistake.

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