at the time page conceived of backrub the web comprised an estimated  million documents with an untold number of links between them the computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project unaware of exactly what he was getting into page began building out his crawler the ideas complexity and scale lured brin to the job a polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic he found the premise behind backrub fascinating "i talked to lots of research groups" around the school brin recalls "and this was the most exciting project both because it tackled the web which represents human knowledge and because i liked larry"