Graduating from the University of Michigan, Page pursued postgraduate studies in computer science at Stanford University. He and fellow student Sergey Brin shared interests in data mining and the structure of the World Wide Web, which led to several papers, including their seminal ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’. Their theoretical work was realized (1996–8) in the Google search engine, and they founded Google Inc. in 1998. Page was its first CEO (1998–2001) and has since returned to that role (2011– ). He is currently ‘on leave’ from his doctoral course at Stanford.