[gghootch]

I'm not sure whether this is applicable but my main objection with this article is that the numbers don't add up. How many Ph.D. candidates do you know who are granted a budget of $10k+ to do their research? Surely something else must have been going on to shrink the expenses to a more acceptable amount.

Then again, according to the wikipedia page the original BackRub was conceived when the web was only 10 million pages large, $2000 is considerably more acceptable for a Ph.D. project.

[enki]

"The SDLP is notable in the history of Google as a primary sources of funding for Lawrence Page's and Sergey Brin (Brin was also supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship) during the period they developed the precursors and initial versions of the Google search engine prior to the incorporation of Google as a private entity"

This included a $4,516,573 NSF grant (that didn't go to Larry & Sergey in full, but probably helped their project's infrastructure quite a bit).

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=9411... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Digital_Library_Projec...

On the expense side I've probably actually underestimated the expenses by orders of magnitude. Bandwidth wasn't cheap back then and the storage requirements probably were significantly higher.