The 21 Most Important Googlers You’ve Never Heard Of (GOOG)

Salar Kamangar Google 1999

Everyone knows about Larry, Sergey, and Eric.

However, few people know about the rest of the Google team that really made it possible.

We recently read Steve Levy’s thorough book on Google, In The Plex, and pulled out some of the names that popped up.

These people might not be as famous (or rich) as Larry and Sergey, but their contributions were key to making Google the beast it is today.

Andy Bechtolsheim, Dave Cheriton, Ram Shriram, and Jeff Bezos were the first backers

Without investment from these angel investors, Google may not have been able to get going. Interestingly, Jeff Bezos was one of the first people. He might still be holding onto some Google stock, says Levy.

Amit Singhal totally rewrote the code Google used to determine what mattered in search in 2001

The original code Google used to determine what signals mattered was written by Larry Page, but it was in desperate need of a rewrite. So early hire Amit Singhal did it.

Five years later Singhal was named a Google fellow and probably awarded millions for his work.

Matt Cutts killed porn from Google’s results

Google needed to weed out unsafe results from its search, like Porn. Matt Cutts was the man tasked with looking at websites to determine what was and what was not porn. From there he assembled a list of signals for the search engine to filter out the filth.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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