In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The citation (link) graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps containing as many as 518 million of these hyperlinks, a significant sample of the total. These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page’s "PageRank", an objective measure of its citatio... See more
Larry Page • The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
I didn’t particularly think Google was going to be that successful, but I thought the technology was unusually special. Alphabet had invented a different way of doing ranking. All of the previous search engines used a ranking easily manipulated by business forces. But Larry Page had invented something now known as PageRank, which is a different alg
... See moreDavid M. Rubenstein • How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers
Thanks to this powerful data network effect, Google was able to move down the stack. Google wasn’t “just a website” anymore, it became an aggregator that commoditized all other websites and made them layers on top of Google’s.
Julian Lehr • The Power of Defaults
Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned.