The funding behind Google's origin, including an NSF digital libraries grant

Google began as a Stanford University dorm room project

Launched in 1998, Google revolutionized search engines with its clean design and PageRank algorithm. As of 2025, Google has about 90% of the search market share but faces new challenges from AI-powered competitors and regulatory scrutiny.

7 angel investors funded Google in its early days

Entrepreneur Shaan Puri shares how seven strangers acted as Google’s earliest angel investors. The first gave Google $100K without even putting his equity agreement in writing. The investors on “Shark Tank” use their personal funds to support startups, but they’re often more predatory about terms than typical angels.

The NSF funded the design and construction of LIGO by MIT and Caltech

The 1992 Cooperative Agreement between the National Science Foundation and both research institutions came twelve years after funding 1.5-meter (4.9-foot) and 40-meter (131-foot) prototypes. With a 1992 budget of $395M, LIGO was once one of the largest NSF-funded projects in history

The history of Vannevar Bush, who influenced the creation of hyperlinks and the NSF

As director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush submitted a report outlining how to support basic research at American colleges and universities by establishing an independent funding agency, which laid the groundwork for the National Science Foundation. His idea for a Memex machine that connected microfilm content in "associative trails" of links would influence Douglas Engelbart's development of hypertext.

Google chose Santa Barbara to host its Quantum AI computing project

The project seeks to reduce errors within its quantum computer and integrate 1 million physical qubits (or quantum bits) into the room-sized computer. This powerful device will attempt to solve complex problems in medicine, computing, and more.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library of the Web

Founded in 1996, the Archive promotes open access and the digital preservation of online information and, as of 2026, contains more than 200 petabytes of content, including over one trillion web pages, 56 million books and texts, 13 million audio recordings, 1.3 million software programs, and other digital content.

How PageRank—Google's search algorithm—mimics academic citation analysis

Just as research papers carry more weight if they are cited more often and cite major papers to reach their conclusion, Google's PageRank identifies search relevance based on the number and quality of links pointing to a page.

The federal government distributes more than $160M in grants directly to libraries each year

The Institute of Museum and Library Services distributes funds annually to State Library Administrative Agencies, which support statewide initiatives and channel funds to public and academic libraries.

Google only sorts and searches a fraction of the overall internet

The "surface web," consisting of billions of public webpages, excludes nonindexed digital content, such as corporate intranets and email inboxes. A deeper layer, called the dark web, is also hidden and requires special software to access.

The history of the Linux Foundation, a technology consortium supporting open-source projects

The nonprofit, founded in 2000 by IBM, HP, Intel, and others as the Open Source Development Labs, was established to build the infrastructure needed to scale with the growing development of Linux. Upon merging with the Free Standards Group in 2007, it rebranded as the Linux Foundation and, as of 2024, provides a "neutral home for code and collaboration" to almost 1,000 projects.

How the National Science Foundation supports the US economy

The NSF has filled funding gaps in the research and development of products developed in the private sector, particularly when the research requires more than three years to complete. These investments, including in startups such as Qualcomm and Symantec, have supported job creation, generated economic returns, and helped build the technologies many industries rely upon, such as the internet.

The $3B project scientists called 'junk'

In 1990, scientists set out to map all of human DNA. A $3B bet many called "junk." But the Human Genome Project's radical transparency and a race with a private company sped it to completion in just 13 years. Today, that once-contested map underpins nearly every breakthrough in genetics and personalized medicine.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Court documents reveal how Anthropic destroyed millions of books to build its AI models

Anthropic cut the bindings from purchased books and discarded them after scanning to rapidly collect high-quality text at low cost for training Claude. This, despite hiring the former head of partnerships for the Google Books project, which nondestructively scanned millions of books borrowed from libraries before returning them.

One office park had an outsized role in the birth of Silicon Valley

Developed in 1951, Stanford Research Park was more than just a pioneering suburban office park. It would go on to catalyze Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem as a whole.

Google data centers possess six layers of security

Property boundaries, such as anti-climb fencing, overlapping cameras, vehicle crash barriers, and circulating patrols, are coupled with lobby iris scans and ID and badge checks. The security operations center monitors individuals throughout their visit, including the less than 1% of Google users who ever receive permission to visit the data center floor.

How Google Street View generates profit

Google Maps, one of the most trusted navigation applications today, has a somewhat mysterious way of making a profit. YouTuber Phil Edwards uncovers the secret economic practices of Google Street View, while also offering a deeper understanding of how it works.

Global investing in startups hit a record $297B in Q1 2026

The level of startup funding around the world broke all previous records in Q1 2026 by a significant margin: Only $118B was raised in the previous quarter, and Q1's haul outpaced every full year of global VC activity before 2019. The increase was partly due to the enormous funding rounds from AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

A conversation with Wikipedia’s cofounder

In the early 2000s, the nonprofit free encyclopedia Wikipedia launched and became one of the most visited sites on the internet. This lengthy interview with cofounder Jimmy Wales provides insight into how the encyclopedia originated, how it is funded, its plans for the future, and a number of other facts about the hugely influential resource.

Married computer scientists at Stanford University built the router that became the foundation for Cisco

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner were both computer scientists at Stanford University in 1984 when the pair created a router that connected computers on different networks. The pair asked for Stanford's permission to manufacture the router, but the university declined, and the couple decided to leave their jobs to launch Cisco, one of the tech companies that powers the internet.

Read Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg's $45B letter to their daughter

After giving birth to their daughter, the Zuckerbergs launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015. The pair announced the charitable organization's creation in a letter addressed to their daughter. The Zuckerbergs pledged 99% of their earnings from Facebook over the course of their lives to advance education, cure disease, and transform public policy, something the letter says is a commitment to their daughter's future. The organization has since shifted its focus to artificial intelligence and science.

Explore more than 7,000 of the world's languages

Google collects open-source data on languages, detailing how many known speakers each language has, whether its endangered, and where in the world it is spoken.

Listen to a conversation between two Palantir cofounders—Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale

Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale was an editor of the Stanford Review (which Peter Thiel founded), and Thiel became a mentor to Lonsdale. The two discussed shared sentiments about the importance of developing Palantir to maintain a largely American global order, as well as cultural revolutions.

Netflix's recommendation algorithm was born from a $1M competition

In 2006, Netflix launched an open competition for data science teams to develop approaches to outperform its recommendation algorithm. Three years later, the prize was awarded after a group of competitors merged, developing a solution that beat Netflix's internal algorithm by more than 10%. Today, recommendations are based on what users watch, particularly via bingeing.

The origin of LASIK eye surgery, from a lab incident to federal funding and widespread use

After a University of Michigan engineering student suffered retinal burns from an ultrashort pulse laser, researchers realized it could be used to reshape the cornea and improve a person's vision with greater precision than a scalpel and earlier laser technologies. Agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy, provided funding to develop and commercialize the procedure.

The Grace Hopper subsea cable transmits internet traffic across the Atlantic

Running between the US, UK, and Spain, the cable is part of an extensive underwater network of fiber optic connections that transmit data across the world at light speed. Equipped with 16 fiber pairs, the private cable was Google's first-ever subsea connection to Spain.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Watch this video that uses Lego bricks to explain how venture capital works.

The USPS spent $3.97B in 2024, accounting for .058% of the federal budget.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

An initial public offering or 'IPO' is the process of a private company becoming public by putting shares of the company on the stock market for purchase.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.