Larry Page and Sergey Brin are sitting at the Gourmet Mandarin restaurant in Palo Alto, California, preparing to meet with Paul Flaherty of Alta Vista to explain the merits of their Google search engine. They hope Alta Vista will fund them to gain access to their soon-to-be-patented PageRank ranking system. Flaherty realizes the guys have something revolutionary on their hands, but Alta Vista rejects the offer, as it is busy with the Digital merger with Compaq, and the search function is just one of Alta Vista’s many goals, along with shopping, email, news, and so on.
