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
Google made historic profits from that product by creating a new form of advertising—nonintrusive and even useful.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
evil”—but it seemed to have a blind spot regarding the consequences of its own technology on privacy and property rights.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“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.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.
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
AltaVista’s actual search quality techniques—what determined the ranking of results—were based on traditional information retrieval (IR) algorithms.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Teams of APMs were each given $50 to buy the weirdest gadgets they could find.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
If the pages for a given query were not quite in the proper order, they’d go back to the algorithm and see what had gone wrong.