I'm not sure whether this is applicable but my main objection with this article is that the numbers don't add up. How many Ph.D. candidates do you know who are granted a budget of $10k+ to do their research? Surely something else must have been going on to shrink the expenses to a more acceptable amount.
Then again, according to the wikipedia page the original BackRub was conceived when the web was only 10 million pages large, $2000 is considerably more acceptable for a Ph.D. project.
"The SDLP is notable in the history of Google as a primary sources of funding for Lawrence Page's and Sergey Brin (Brin was also supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship) during the period they developed the precursors and initial versions of the Google search engine prior to the incorporation of Google as a private entity"
This included a $4,516,573 NSF grant (that didn't go to Larry & Sergey in full, but probably helped their project's infrastructure quite a bit).
On the expense side I've probably actually underestimated the expenses by orders of magnitude. Bandwidth wasn't cheap back then and the storage requirements probably were significantly higher.
Then again, according to the wikipedia page the original BackRub was conceived when the web was only 10 million pages large, $2000 is considerably more acceptable for a Ph.D. project.