Google's Larry Page Almost Skipped Internet Search for Telepresence

At a Faculty Summit in 2009, Google's Larry Page told the audience that while at Stanford, he had to choose from three different academic areas to study: Telepresence (Google has been working in this area and has a Google Talk client in Android Honeycomb), Automated cars - which he he was leaning toward - and of course the "link structure of the web" - which eventually became PageRank and Google.  Though Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt had been envisioning  driverless cars for years, it was officially unveiled as a Google project in October.


Terry Winograd, Page's advisor at Stanford, recommended that he work on web search.  It would have been interesting to see what would have come should he have pursued telepresence instead.

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