In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy

The science fiction writer William Gibson once said that the future is already here—just not evenly distributed.

Then you’d go backward. That’s why Page called his system BackRub. “The early versions of hypertext had a tragic flaw: you couldn’t follow links in the other direction,” Page once told a reporter. “BackRub was about reversing that.”

He asked Page to pick a number, to say how much of the web he needed to crawl, and to estimate how many disks that would take. “I want to crawl the whole web,” Page said.

‘Wow, the big problem here is not annotation. We should now use it not just for ranking annotations, but for ranking searches.’”

They argued that there was no way to make money from a search engine but relented when Monier sold them on the public relations aspect.

combined with a number of more traditional information retrieval techniques, such as comparing the keyword to text on the page and determining relevance by examining factors such as frequency, font size, capitalization, and position of the keyword. (Those factors help determine the importance of a keyword on a given page—if a term is prominently featured, the page is more likely to satisfy a query.) Such factors are known as signals, and they are critical to search quality.

(There was another reason for the button. “The point of I’m Feeling Lucky was to replace the domain name system for navigation,” Page said in 2002. Both Page and Brin hoped that instead of guessing what was the address of their web destination, they’d just “go to Google.”)

Google was handling as many as 10,000 queries a day. At times it was consuming half of Stanford’s Internet capacity.

to have them sign on to a small start-up. Oh, and they had a policy that limited the field: no creeps. They were already thinking of the culture of their company and making sure that their hires would show traits of hard-core wizardry, user focus, and starry-eyed idealism.