In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
I began to get an insider’s sense of Google’s product processes—and how serving its users was akin to a crusade.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Such factors are known as signals, and they are critical to search quality.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.”
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
“He was brilliant,”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
if you have a way of ranking things based not just on the page itself but based on what the world thought of that page, that would be a really valuable thing for search.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
During the 1960s, Salton developed a system that was to become a model for information retrieval. It was called SMART,
Steven Levy • 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.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“One of these people will probably be our CEO one day—we just don’t know which one.”