In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
It just knew how to take advantage of the fact that links created by the web community had implicitly produced a ranking that was better than any group of magazine editors or knowledge curators could come up with.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Until that moment, the task of compiling a list of universities and ranking them in significance had been complicated, intellectually challenging, and labor-intensive. Some magazines employed large teams working for months to do just that.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“Kleinberg had this notion of authority, where your page can become good just by linking to the right pages,”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
If the pages for a given query were not quite in the proper order, they’d go back to the algorithm and see what had gone wrong.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Kleinberg was trying to understand network behavior. Page and Brin were building something.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Larry Page and Sergey Brin had figured out how to mine that knowledge before the information retrieval establishment and commercial search engines even realized that it existed.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
that the user is never wrong. The person in the system is never wrong.”
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
The winner would be the one with the most in-links from the group.”