In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
When you looked at a page you could see, usually highlighted in blue, the pointers to other sites that the
Steven Levy • 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
virtually everyone in the United States and everywhere in the wired-up world knew Google.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
They all grew up with the Internet and considered its principles to be as natural as the laws of gravity.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The program would visit a web page, find all the links, and put them into a queue.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Page believed that this principle could also work with web pages. But getting the right data would be difficult. Web pages made their outgoing links transparent: built into the code were easily identifiable markers for the destinations you could travel to with a mouse click from that page.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
When I heard a bit about the site’s method of extracting such good results—it relied on sort of a web-based democracy—I
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
A signal says to the search engine, “Hey, consider me for your results!” PageRank itself is a signal. A web page with a high PageRank number sends a message to the search engine that it’s a more reputable source than those with lower numbers.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
When people proposed a short-term solution, Page’s instinct was to think