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?

At every office the APMs visited, they attended meetings with local Googlers, first learning about projects under way and then explaining to the residents what was going on at Mountain View headquarters.

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

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.

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?”

At that point the engine needs some help to figure out how to rank those pages. So it looks for signals—traits that can help the engine figure out which pages will satisfy the query.

that the user is never wrong. The person in the system is never wrong.”

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

No one at the web search companies mentioned using links. The links were the reason that a research project running on a computer in a Stanford dorm room had become the top performer.

Such factors are known as signals, and they are critical to search quality.