University of Michigan Graduation 2009 – Larry Page, Google Co-Founder

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was the featured speaker for the University of Michigan 2009 Graduation. This is the last five minutes of his speech. This isn’t as good as the official google video, but it captures the crowd and feeling of the stadium. Google co-founder and 1995 UM graduate Larry Page was the main speaker during spring commencement May 2 in Ann Arbor. Page received an honorary Doctor of Engineering Degree. “Larry Page, in the universe of the World Wide Web, your inventions allow us to discover immediately the most relevant information existing among billions of items,” the honorary degree citation says. “Moreover, you have expanded our world of knowledge and engaged all generations by inviting us ‘to Google,’ expanding our vocabulary and lives with a new action-verb full of creative brilliance.” Page, a native of East Lansing and son of one of UM’s earliest computer science graduates, developed the PageRank algorithm with his partner Sergey Brin in the late 1990s. In 2004, they launched Google Books, an ambitious plan to boost access to the world’s libraries, including UM’s massive library collection. You can view the transcript to the speech at www.google.com