Google academic papers
Posted on Sunday, November 13, 2005
at 9:02 PM
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The footnotes to Chapter 2 of "The Search" cited a 1998 paper, "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine," by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It described the early Google architecture and their plans for it. It's pretty readable, and provides an interest glimpse of their views before they dreamed of controlling the world from their own 767 continually circling the globe at 40,000 feet.
A little research revealed a set of additional papers by Brin and Page, or in some cases one of them along with other co-authors. Someday these papers may provide a historian of science with some valuable source material. I wonder if they saved their early emails?
I also came across Sergey's
home page from Stanford circa 1998, where I found this adorable picture of him.
Book Note: The Search
Posted on Sunday, November 13, 2005
at 8:30 PM
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After a long day of Ruby coding it's time for a little bedtime reading. Here's another installment of the abridged version of "The Search." Much of this chapter is a recounting of lost opportunities with search engines that preceded Google, which I'll spare you, but there are some fascinating factoids about search and some interesting insights.
Chapter 2. Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How (Much)
At the end of the day, the holy grail of all search engines is to decipher your true intent--what you are looking for, and in what context. ... When you type in a one-word query for "York," for example, do you want results for "New York"? Most likely the answer is no. (p. 23)
[Indexing the Web] is no small task: by most accounts Google alone has more than 750,000 computers dedicated to the job. (p. 24)
Pew estimates that on any gven day in the United States, 38 million people are using a search engine. All those searches add up to nearly 4 billion queries each month. (p. 25)
Piper Jaffray estimates that the world conducted about 550 million searches each day in 2003. (p. 26)
From its inception as a business in the late 1990s to 2004, paid search as an industry grew from a base in the low millions to $4 billion in revenue, and it is estimated to hit $23 billion by 2010, according to Piper Jaffray. (p. 234)
Google alone boasts more than 225,000 unique advertiser relationships. (p. 35)
According to a report from Dieringer Research Group, nearly 100 million people made purchases after doing online research in 2003, and nearly 115 million searched for product information. (p. 36)
Book Note: The Search
Posted on Wednesday, November 9, 2005
at 2:15 PM
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I finished this book a month ago, but I was so impressed that I decided to go back and see if I could collect the key insights from each chapter to create an abbreviated guide. Hopefully this will encourage you to buy and read the whole thing.
Chapter 1. The Database of Intentions
By the fall of 2001, the Internet industry was in full retreat. Hundreds of once promising start-ups--mine among them--lay smoldering in bankruptcy. (p. 1)
[Google] Zeitgeist had more than its finger on the pulse of our culture, it was directly jacked into the culture's nervous system. This was my first glimpse into what I came to call the Database of Intentions--a living artifact of immense power. (p. 2)
Google was a technology business, he [Eric Schmidt] told me. (p. 3)
A year later I met with Eric again. Among his first words: "Isn't the media business great?" (p. 4)
Much as the Windows interface defined our interactions with the personal computer, search defines our interactions with the Internet. (p. 4)
The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. (p. 6)
This structure will provide the seedbed for scores of new cultural phenomena over the next decade. (p. 7)
Companies like Overture and Google made their first profits in the darkest hours of the dot-com collapse. (p. 8)
In essence we have taken much of our once-ephemeral and quotidian lives--our daily habits of whom we talk to, what we look for, what we buy--and made those actions eternal. (p. 10)
Search drives clickstreams, and clickstreams drive profits. To profit in the Internet space, corporations need access to clickstreams. And this, more than any other reason, is why clickstreams are becoming eternal. (p. 12)
If Google and companies like it know what the world wants, powerful organizations become quite interested in them, and vulnerable individuals see them as a threat. (p. 13)
As a Google executive noted to me when I brought this up: "We're one bad story away from being seen as Big Brother." (p. 14)
But imagine the disorientation you might feel if search becomes self-aware--capable of watching you as you interact with it. (p. 15)
My problem is not finding something," says Danny Hillis, a MacArthur Foundation genius and computer scientist who now runs a consulting company. "My problem is understanding something." (p. 16)
