How Larry and Sergey are Googling their way to a [euro]3bn fortune.

(From Irish Independent)

WHEN MONEY TALKS...

Nobody asked Larry Page and Sergey Brin to reinvent the internet - but they did it anyway. Google, the search engine created by the two friends as a college project, transformed the web from insane hubbub to navigable reservoir of knowledge.

In so doing, it fundamentally altered our relationship with the world online; no longer didwe fish haphazardly for information, as likely to retrieve a chewed boot or old liquor bottle as our intended catch. The triumph of Google was to tame the internet just as itthreatened to sprawl beyond the limits of human comprehension, bringing a semblance oforder to the building anarchy.

And now Page and Brin are poised for a multibillion dollar payday. Deep within theGoogleplex, the lavish northern California headquarters of Google, the pair are rumouredto be preparing the biggest public share offering since the height of dotcom fever in the late 1990s. It is conservatively estimated they could each reap [euro]1.5bn.

You won't catch these prospective billionaires rollicking across the society pages though.Despite their wealth - they are already reputed to be worth around $900m - Page and Brin are not known for their profligacy. Their low profiles and reportedly modest lifestylescontrast with those of other IT tycoons such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has constructed his own Xanadu on a Seattle lakeside, and Oracle boss Larry Ellison, an enthusiastic collector of fighter jets.

If [euro]3bn sounds an obscene haul for two 30-nothings whose brainchild was essentially a clever refinement of earlier search engines, consider for a moment the breadth and scaleof Google's impact.