Google's Third founder

Just as Google is celebrating its 10th anniversary, a man claiming to be the "third" founder of Google has come out to stake his claim to history."Google was designed by Larry, Sergey, and me in February 1997,"Hubert Chang claims in this online video.Chang has emerged from obscurity this week with the audacious claim that he helped launch the search giant in 1997 along with acknowledged co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

In the video, Chang said he met Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani in the summer of 1996 while studying for a Ph.D. at New York University. Motwani, later introduced him to Brin and Page, who were students at Stanford.Chang claims he helped Brin and Page come up with the PageRank algorithm that became the basis for Google's search engine. He also said they all agreed on the kind of corporate culture the company should have.

Google's response to Chang's claims is "Though many people were involved with Google in its early days, it has been well documented over the past decade that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in September 1998."Google's sparse corporate history makes no mention of Chang.

Motwani, in an e-mail, dismissed Chang's claims. He recalls email correspondence with Chang but refutes any existence of a third founder.He mentions by the time the basic idea of PageRank was in place and there was a clear intent of building a company around it he never met with Hubert Chang.

Chang claimed he did not stay to help found Google because he had a made a commitment to his father to finish getting his Ph.D. He also said his e-mail correspondence from 1997 was not saved because he exceeded the NYU e-mail quota for messages at the time.

He closes the video by noting after ten years he's telling his story. "I feel quite confident about the good side of humanity. If you could, please forward this video to your friends. Thank you."

Squabbles over who originated a specific technology or concept are nothing new in Silicon Valley. The latest high profile case involves competing claims by Harvard classmates that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social networking giant Facebook, wasn't the only founder. But this kind of claim so late is quite skeptical.

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