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

Internet as a whole. As the Internet grew and the amount of content increased at a superlinear rate, so did the difficulty of filtering and finding relevant information, making search increasingly important. Combine that effect with the rapid growth of the Internet itself, and the result was a massive market. Google has astutely expanded the market

Hal Varian, by the way, is the person who designed the Google ad auction. And it turned out he was only partially right about “information managers”. We call them influencers. But it was aggregators like Google that did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Computers can scale in ways that people can’t.