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

After they snared about 15 million of those titles, they tested the program to see which websites it deemed more authoritative.

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

the annual trip of Google associate product managers, a select group pegged as the company’s future leaders. We began our journey in San Francisco and touched down in Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, and Tel Aviv

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.

Another powerful signal was the “anchor text” of links that led to the page.

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.”

Google made historic profits from that product by creating a new form of advertising—nonintrusive and even useful.

They argued that there was no way to make money from a search engine but relented when Monier sold them on the public relations aspect.

he posted on the Stanford site in 1995, he talked about “a new project” to generate personalized movie ratings. “The way it works is as follows,” he wrote. “You rate the movies you have seen. Then the system finds other users with similar tastes to extrapolate how much you like other movies.”