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

Only algorithms—well drawn, efficiently executed, and based on sound data—could deliver unbiased results.

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

PageRank. It made BackRub much more useful than the results you’d get from the commercial search engines.

Amazon.com and eBay became Internet giants. Other sites positioned themselves as gateways, or portals, to the wonders of the Internet.

So the problem became finding the right data to determine whose comments were more trustworthy, or interesting, than others. Page realized that such data already existed and no one else was really using it. He asked Brin, “Why don’t we use the links on the web to do that?”

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.”

At that point the engine needs some help to figure out how to rank those pages. So it looks for signals—traits that can help the engine figure out which pages will satisfy the query.

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.

he was one of the youngest students ever to start the Stanford PhD program. “He skipped a million years,”