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Nd part) THE GOOGLE MYSTIQUE

When Judge Richard Posner wrote a book recently to identify the world’s leading intellectuals, he used Google hits as a key criterion. When the Chinese government decided that the Web offered its citizenry an overly intimate view of the world outside its borders, what better way to pull down the shades than to block Google? (Within a week the Chinese changed direction; Google was too useful to withhold.) Companies that do business online have become justifiably obsessed with Google’s power. “If you drop down on Google, your business can come to a screeching halt,” says Greg Boser of WebGuerilla, an Internet consultancy. And if two clashing egos want to see whose Google is bigger, they need only venture to a Web site like GoogleFight to compare results.

Google was the brainchild of two Stanford graduate students who refused to accept the conventional wisdom that Internet searching was either a solved problem or not very interesting. Larry Page was an all-American type (geek variety) whose dad taught computer science in Lansing, Mich. Sergey Brin, with the dark brooding looks of a chess prodigy, emigrated from Russia at the age of 6: his father was a math professor. Brin and Page, who met as 22-year-old doctoral candidates in computer science in 1995, began with an academic research project that morphed into an experiment on Web searching.

Their big idea was something they called PageRank (named after Larry), which took into account not just the title or text on a Web site but the other sites linked to it. “Our intention of doing the ranking properly was that you should get the site you meant to get,” says Page. Basically, the system exploited the dizzyingly complex linking network of the Web itself—and the collective intelligence of the millions who surfed the Web—so that when you searched, you could follow in the pathways of others who were interested in that same information.

 

‘I’M FEELING LUCKY’

When you searched for “New York Yankees” on some other engine, the top results might be crowded with sporting goods stores or books on Sparky Lyle. With Backrub (the system’s original name), your first hit would be the Official Yankees Home Page. Brin and Page were so confident they could deliver the eureka! result that in addition to the button that elicits search results, they created a cut-to-the-chase button labeled I’M FEELING LUCKY. Take the dare, and if all goes well, you’ll go straight to your most relevant destination.

Their system became a cult favorite among Stanfordites, and more computer power was required. Page and Brin would sit on loading docks and wait for new servers to be delivered to the computer-science department. “Pretty soon, we had 10,000 searches a day,” says Page. “And we figured, maybe this is really real.”

So in 1998 they sought to fund a company. After a 15-minute pitch, Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolscheim wrote a $100,000 check on the spot. It was made out to Google, the new name that the founders had chosen (“Googol” is the mathematical term for the number one followed by a hundred zeros). At that point, Brin and Page figured they’d better incorporate, so they could open a bank account in which to deposit the check. Eventually venture-capital firms signed on, and the start-up took space in a Mountain View office park, which was dubbed the Googleplex.



 


Date: 2016-01-05; view: 630


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