Without getting fancy, here are some key dates: 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin experiment with a new type of search engine. In those ancient days search engines simply ranked results by how often a searched-for term appears on a web page. But Page and Brin are after something a bit more sophisticated, a range of metrics that cumulatively determine how important the searched items are on a particular page. They literally used a friend's garage as an office while working on this idea. A cliche is born, the garage-born web business. 1998: The new business is formally created when Page and Brin persuade a co-founder of Sun Microsystems to pony up $100,000 so they can incorporate, set up shop in Menlo Park and hire their first employee. 2002: Yahoo offers to buy out Google for $3 billion. Google holds to a valuation of $5 billion, and the talks end without result. Also this year, in a display of the mainstreaming of the verb form of their name, an episode of t...