Sergey and Larry awarded the Seoul Test-of-Time Award from WWW 2015

Today, at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in Florence, Italy, our company founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, received the inaugural Seoul Test-of-Time Award for their 1998 paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which introduced Google to the world at the 7th WWW conference in Brisbane, Australia. I had the pleasure and honor to accept the award on behalf of Larry and Sergey from Professor Chin-Wan Chung, who led the committee that created the award.
Except for the fact that I was myself in Brisbane, it is hard to believe that Google began just as a two-student research project at Stanford University 17 years ago with the goal to “produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.” Their paper presented two breakthrough concepts: first, using a distributed system built on inexpensive commodity hardware to deal with the size of the index, and second, using the hyperlink structure of the Web as a powerful new relevance signal. By now these ideas are common wisdom, but their paper continues to be very influential: it has over 13,000 citations so far and more are added every day.

Since those beginnings Google has continued to grow, with tools that enable small business owners to reach customers, help long lost friends to reunite, and empower users to discover answers. We keep pursuing new ideas and products, generating discoveries that both affect the world and advance the state-of-the-art in Computer Science and related disciplines. From products like Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth Engine to advances in Machine Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Natural Language Understanding, it is our continuing goal to create useful tools and services that benefit our users.

Larry and Sergey sent a video message to the conference expressing their thanks and their encouragement for future research, in which Sergey said “There is still a ton of work left to do in Search, and on the Web as a whole and I couldn’t think of a more exciting time to be working in this space.” I certainly share this view, and was very gratified by the number of young computer scientists from all over the world that came by the Google booth at the conference to share their thoughts about the future of search, and to explore the possibility of joining our efforts.