In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
PageRank. It made BackRub much more useful than the results you’d get from the commercial search engines.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Teams of APMs were each given $50 to buy the weirdest gadgets they could find.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Amazon.com and eBay became Internet giants. Other sites positioned themselves as gateways, or portals, to the wonders of the Internet.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The PageRank score would be combined with a number of more traditional information retrieval techniques, such as comparing the keyword to text on the page and determining relevance by examining factors such as frequency, font size, capitalization, and position of the keyword.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
evil”—but it seemed to have a blind spot regarding the consequences of its own technology on privacy and property rights.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
AltaVista’s actual search quality techniques—what determined the ranking of results—were based on traditional information retrieval (IR) algorithms.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
What’s more, I was stunned when a poll of my fellow travelers revealed that not a single one of them saw him- or herself
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
“One of these people will probably be our CEO one day—we just don’t know which one.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
working for Google in five years. Marissa Mayer took this news calmly, claiming that such ambition was why they had been hired in the first place. “This is the gene that Larry and Sergey look for,” she told me. “Even if they leave, it’s still good for us. They’re going to take the Google DNA with them.”