After 10 years “Third” Founder of Google comes out of the Bush

Sunday, September 28th, 2008


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

Just as is celebrating its 10th anniversary, a man claiming to be the “third” founder of 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 founders by Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani. He then helped the two come up with PageRank (the underlying algorithm that powers ’s search engine), the name , 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 , 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, , and Hubert Chang asking for more details. By his own account, though, it sounds like Chang walked away from because he thought it wouldn’t amount to much. His mistake.

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