In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The amount of information on the web is  growing rapidly, as well as the number of new users inexperienced in the art of web research. People are  likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices  such as Yahoo! or with sea... See more

Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times t... See more

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

Livingston: Was there a cold call that you made that turned out to be pivotal? Kraus: No, the pivotal things were all unintentional. Like the way we got turned on to the Web: it was about '94 and we were deciding between two technologies for the interface. How do you present search technology to the user if it's not a command line? One was HyperCar

... See more