
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.
Steven Levy • 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
... See moreSteven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Another powerful signal was the “anchor text” of links that led to the page.
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
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
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.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.”