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

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
... See moreSteven Levy • 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
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?
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
saw Google as a vehicle to realize the dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
network. In effect, the web was an infinite database, a sort of crazily expanding universe of human knowledge that, in theory, could hold every insight, thought, image, and product for sale.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Larry Page’s PageRank was powerful because it cleverly analyzed those links and assigned a number to them, a metric on a scale of 1 to 10, that allowed you to see the page’s prominence in comparison to every other page on the web.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“We invest more into our APMs than any other company has ever invested into young employees…. We envision a world where everyone is awed by the fact that Google’s executives, the best CEOs in the Silicon Valley, and the most respected leaders of global non-profits all came through the Google APM program.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
number of the web page itself. “The idea behind PageRank was that you can estimate the importance of a web page by the web pages that link to it,”