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

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.

“We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.”

Meanwhile, AltaVista analyzed what was on each individual page—using metrics like how many times each word appeared—to

This search engine transformed the way people worked, entertained themselves, and learned.

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

This is how I put it in the February 22, 1999, issue of Newsweek: “Google, the Net’s hottest search engine, draws on feedback from the web itself to deliver more relevant results to customer queries.”

The mistrust and fear in the courtroom were reflected globally by governments upset by Google’s privacy policies and businesses worried that Google’s disruptive practices would target them next.

“In a way, how good you are is determined by who links to you and who you link to determines how good you are. It’s all a big circle. But mathematics is great. You can solve this.”

Search was a four-step process. First came a sweeping scan of all the world’s web pages, via a spider. Second was indexing the information drawn from the spider’s crawl and storing the data on racks of computers known as servers. The third step, triggered by a user’s request, identified the pages that seemed best suited to answer that query. That r