Google founder's named men of the year

The founders of Internet search engine Google have been named the Financial Times men of the year, the newspaper said today.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both 32, were given the accolade for the effect the company they founded seven years ago has had in the last year on Internet users and the worlds of business and technology, the FT said.

It also noted Google's rising stock market value of nearly $130bn (€110bn), which has put it virtually level-pegging with technology giants IBM and just behind Microsoft and Intel.

Fresh from an investment in AOL earlier this week, Brin and Page admitted there was still scope to improve Google's core product.

"It's clear there's a lot of room for improvement, there's no inherent ceiling we're hitting up on," said Brin.

"Google has a large computational infrastructure - that could be very useful for microbiology or computational biology," he added.