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

by Steven Levy

to gather and make accessible and useful the world’s information

Google was a company built on the values of its founders, who harbored ambitions to build a powerful corporation that would impact the entire world, at the same time loathing the bureaucracy and commitments that running such a company would entail.

Its mission was collecting and organizing all the world’s information—

“I really wanted to change the world.”

I didn’t want to just invent things, I also wanted to make the world better, and in order to do that, you need to do more than just invent things.”

Tim Berners-Lee,

“Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked … there would be a single global information space.”

In retrospect, the web was to the digital world what the Louisiana Purchase was to the young United States: the opportunity of a century.

“We needed a rating system.”

PageRank.

But it was a sly vanity; many people assumed the name referred to web pages, not a surname.

Scott Hassan

“That first one just used the titles of documents because collecting the documents themselves required a lot of data and work,”

“It was pretty clear to me and the rest of the group,” he says, “that if you have a way of ranking things based not just on the page itself but based on what the world thought of that page, that would be a really valuable thing for search.”