In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
More important, understanding them helps us understand our own world—and tomorrow’s.
Steven Levy • 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,
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.
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
see if a page was a relevant match to a given keyword in a query.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
They were among the brightest and most ambitious of a generation that was better equipped to handle the disruptive technology wave than their elders were. Their minds hummed like tuning forks in resonance with the company’s values of speed, flexibility, and a deep respect for data.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
In theory, complainants could block crawlers by putting a little piece of code on their sites called /robots.txt, but the angry webmasters weren’t receptive to the concept.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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.”
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
‘Wow, the big problem here is not annotation. We should now use it not just for ranking annotations, but for ranking searches.’”