In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
a system that detected copyright violations by automating searches for duplicates of documents. “He came up with some good algorithms for detecting copies,
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
So the problem became finding the right data to determine whose comments were more trustworthy, or interesting, than others. Page realized that such data already existed and no one else was really using it. He asked Brin, “Why don’t we use the links on the web to do that?”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Both felt most comfortable in the meritocracy of academia, where brains trumped everything else. Both had an innate understanding of how the ultraconnected world that they enjoyed as computer science (CS) students was about to spread throughout society. Both shared a core belief in the primacy of data.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
In theory, complainants could block crawlers by putting a little piece of code on their sites called /robots.txt, but the angry webmasters weren’t receptive to the concept.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Then it would check to see if it had visited those link pages previously. If it hadn’t, it would put the link on a queue of future destinations to visit and repeat the process.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The winner would be the one with the most in-links from the group.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Such factors are known as signals, and they are critical to search quality.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Even though the small team was going somewhere, they weren’t quite sure of their destination. “Larry didn’t have a plan,” says Hassan. “In research you explore something and see what sticks.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
PageRank. It made BackRub much more useful than the results you’d get from the commercial search engines.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
But a shadow now darkened Google’s image. To many outsiders, the corporate motto that Google had taken seriously—“Don’t be evil”—had become a joke, a bludgeon to be used against it. What had happened?