Web guru Rajeev Motwani dies in drowning accident

08 June 2009

Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford University computer science professor who mentored the likes of Google's co-founder Sergi Brin, died of a freak accident at a backyard swimming pool at his Bay area home in Atherton, California, on Friday.

Motwani, 47, who did not knew how to swim, apparently drowned accidentally while trying to learn swimming or might have slipped and fallen to the pool, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Silicon Valley tech community thronged the place as soon as news of Motwani's death spread through emails, blogs, Facebook entries, and Twitter feeds.

Among the first to pay tribute was Google's Sergei Brin, who along with his co-founder Larry Page, was Motwani's student in the graduate school at Stanford. They had also worked closely with him as they founded Google.

In fact, according to TechCrunch founder Arrington, it was a 1998 paper called `'What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket' by Brin, Motwani, Page and Terry Winograd that became the basis for Google.

They said in the paper they intended to ''take advantage of the link structure of the web to produce a global 'importance' ranking of every web page.''