"A great comedy duo" is how Time Magazine describes Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But these two dropouts from Stanford's doctoral program in computer science look to be the ones set to do the proverbial laughing all the way to the bank. That's because they left Stanford in 1998 to launch Google.com, and in just a couple years their search engine has become the Web's coolest.

Talk with Page and the Russian-born Brin, both 27, and one-liners are more likely to roll off their tongues than algorithms. But these are unquestionably brainy guys who started with the shared assumption that Web searching was broken: As the Web grew, finding good information got harder. So they devised a wholly new approach to sorting search results that they call PageRank: The more links there are to a page, the higher it vaults in Google's hierarchy. Another innovation: To climb high in the search results, a page needs external validation. Proprietary algorithms that parcel out rankings to pages aren't influenced by spamming and the other techniques that marketers sometimes use to boost a page's rating in other search engines. The math gets complicated-some 6,000 computers get involved-but for the user, Google is simple and easy to use.