in 1996, while they were still graduate students, larry and sergey decided to create a way for people to search more efficiently on the internet. they wanted to develop a search engine that would quickly find the most relevant information from the large amount of data on the internet. with a lot of hard work and creativity, by the end of 1997, their research project had become a big success. they had created backrub-a unique search engine that analyzed web links in a new way.