Sergey Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Russia. His family emigrated to the United States to escape Jewish persecution in 1979. He met Larry Page at Stanford University, and the two created a search engine that would sort web pages based on popularity. They named the search engine “Google,” based on the mathematical term “googol.” Since its launch in 1998, Google has become the most popular search engine in the world.