In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
On his desk and permeating his conversations was Apple interface guru Donald Norman’s classic tome The Psychology of Everyday Things, the bible of a religion whose first, and arguably only, commandment is “The user is always right.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
that their goal was to make the world better, specifically by enabling humanity’s access to information.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“I want to crawl the whole web,”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
long term. There would eventually be a joke among Googlers that Page “went to the future and came back to tell us about it.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“In academia, when there’s a hard problem everyone wants to solve, you’re always implicitly competing with the other people who are working on it,”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
see if a page was a relevant match to a given keyword in a query.
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,”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“He was brilliant,”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
AltaVista’s actual search quality techniques—what determined the ranking of results—were based on traditional information retrieval (IR) algorithms.