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

It was widely recognized that you could identify which papers were really important without reading them—simply tally up how many other papers cited them in notes and bibliographies.

Authors would have new markets; readers would have instant access to knowledge.

to digitize every book every printed, so that anyone in the world could locate the information within. Google would not give away the full contents of the books, so when users discovered them, they would have reason to buy them.

“It was science fiction more than computer science,”

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.

It expressed itself not as a personal drive (though there was that, too) but as a general principle that everyone should think big and then make big things happen.

“Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.”

No one at the web search companies mentioned using links. The links were the reason that a research project running on a computer in a Stanford dorm room had become the top performer.

Entitled “As We May Think,” it outlined a vast storage system called a “memex,” where documents would be connected, and could be recalled, by information breadcrumbs called “trails of association.”