I just finished reading " The Google Story." It is a really good read. I love learning how great businesses got started. Like so many startups, Google was the result of stumbling onto something that became a great idea. And then a great business.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page became friends at Stanford. The both were PhD candidates in search of a dissertation idea. Both advanced through undergraduate studies at an accelerated pace. They already knew most of the stuff being taught before they even arrived. Both came from families where the parents were academics. Mathematics and computers were a breeze to both.
They were frustrated with how Yahoo and Alta Vista did search. Neither company was very good. One day one of the guys announced they were going to download the entire Internet to their computer. Radical! But since they were whizzes, no one really laughed at them. Obviously, it was not an easy task and Google is still working on the ever burgeoning amount of data on the Web. But look at any search result and you will see the word "cache." That means that even if a website no longer exists, Google still has a copy of it on their massive database.
What I did not know was exactly how Google does what it does in terms of search. The book did not detail the entire secret sauce but the basic ideas were there. First, their computers "Crawl" the net copying and indexing every page. This required massive amounts of computing power. Even in their very early days they were buying standard, basic PC's 80 at a time. They use Linux and proprietary software to connect these computers in a massive supercomputer. Second, they came up with complex algorithms for determining the number and value of a link to a website. They then rank websites in terms of importance and content to display incredibly accurate results. A link from Yahoo to your page is much more important than a link from my website. Their computers figure all of this out.
I just finished reading " The Google Story." It is a really good read. I love learning how great businesses got started. Like so many startups, Google was the result of stumbling onto something that became a great idea. And then a great business.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page became friends at Stanford. The both were PhD candidates in search of a dissertation idea. Both advanced through undergraduate studies at an accelerated pace. They already knew most of the stuff being taught before they even arrived. Both came from families where the parents were academics. Mathematics and computers were a breeze to both.
They were frustrated with how Yahoo and Alta Vista did search. Neither company was very good. One day one of the guys announced they were going to download the entire Internet to their computer. Radical! But since they were whizzes, no one really laughed at them. Obviously, it was not an easy task and Google is still working on the ever burgeoning amount of data on the Web. But look at any search result and you will see the word "cache." That means that even if a website no longer exists, Google still has a copy of it on their massive database.
What I did not know was exactly how Google does what it does in terms of search. The book did not detail the entire secret sauce but the basic ideas were there. First, their computers "Crawl" the net copying and indexing every page. This required massive amounts of computing power. Even in their very early days they were buying standard, basic PC's 80 at a time. They use Linux and proprietary software to connect these computers in a massive supercomputer. Second, they came up with complex algorithms for determining the number and value of a link to a website. They then rank websites in terms of importance and content to display incredibly accurate results. A link from Yahoo to your page is much more important than a link from my website. Their computers figure all of this out.