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

During the 1960s, Salton developed a system that was to become a model for information retrieval. It was called SMART,

This search engine transformed the way people worked, entertained themselves, and learned.

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.

Berners-Lee could sum up his vision in a sentence: “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked … there would be a single global information space.”

In Bangalore, there was a different shopping hunt—an excursion to the market area where the winner of the competition would be the one who haggled best. (Good training for making bulk purchases of computers or even buying an Internet start-up.)

was pretty clear to everyone who saw this demo that this was a very good, very powerful way to order things.”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin had figured out how to mine that knowledge before the information retrieval establishment and commercial search engines even realized that it existed.

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.”

This is how I put it in the February 22, 1999, issue of Newsweek: “Google, the Net’s hottest search engine, draws on feedback from the web itself to deliver more relevant results to customer queries.”