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

a system that detected copyright violations by automating searches for duplicates of documents. “He came up with some good algorithms for detecting copies,

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?

saw Google as a vehicle to realize the dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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,”