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Larry Page: Google Was an Accident

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-men dept.

DarklordJonnyDigital writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Google founder Larry Page has admitted that the Google project wasn't originally intended to be a search engine at all. "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations." ' Of course, happy accidents have often been the cause for advancement, technologically or otherwise.

10 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:great inventions by syn3rg · · Score: 0, Informative

    How about Lexan... http://www.geplastics.com/resins/about/history.htm l
    An accidental mixing of resins, which was left overnight in a beaker.

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  2. A book on the subject by rednaxel · · Score: 5, Informative
    Accidents May Happen: 50 Inventions Discovered by Mistake

    Disclaimer: I'm not associated with this book in any way, just found it in, er, Google. Maybe the next edition will include this lovely search engine...

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  3. Re:great inventions by Jester99 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to mention two marvels of modern civilization: Penicillin, and Microwave cooking.

  4. Flemming and Penicillin by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd just like to point out that Flemming pretty did nothing with penicillin besides discover its existance (1928)-- he gave up on it after 6 months. It took a whole new generation of doctors and a world war 15 years later to actually make it useful.

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    1. Re:Flemming and Penicillin by Dareth · · Score: 2, Informative

      Flemming used a crude penicillin solution to clean petri dishes to save money on glassware. He published his works on this and also on lysozymes, the anti-bacterial stuff in saliva and tears but was mocked by the established scientific community both times. It was only later, when prompted by the large number of people dying of infection from injuries from the War that his work was rediscovered and penicillin perfected.

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  5. Re:Before google by Beltza · · Score: 5, Informative
    Altavista bragged about how DEC Alpha CPUs, with their 64 bit CPUs returned results faster.

    This was exactly what AltaVista was designed for! AltaVista was created to promote DEC equipment; to show what powerful applications could run on their machines. And it did this job really good.

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  6. Re:like bob ross by bailout911 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, I think Bob always said "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents," but I could be wrong.

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  7. Re:Page has a big ego by DeadSea · · Score: 5, Informative
    The parent post was modded up as funny, but PageRank was actually named after Larry Page. It was not called PageRank because it ranks web pages.

    Larry and others at google has said this in the past. Although I can't find proof on Google's web site (darn lousy search engine they use ;-), I did find this in an article on SearchEngineWorld:

    Google examines link structures all over the web. By doing so, it can give every page a popularity rating known as "PageRank" (named after Google cofounder Larry Page). When you do a search, URLs with high PageRanks are more likely to be listed first. However, this will only happen if the pages also match other criteria, such as containing your search terms or being identified as being relevant to your search terms by analyzing the context of links.

    According to this article, it was originally called "BackRub":

    Google began as a search engine called BackRub. It was so named for what was its, (at the time), unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to and from a given website as part of its algorithms to search results. This approach to link analysis gained BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen the technology. Today this technology is know as Google's patented "PageRanks" technology.

    Another reference: http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/2002/08/30/

  8. Re:I wonderful idea. by Xerithane · · Score: 2, Informative

    It makes you wonder how long until some company comes up with the idea to copyright "the accidental creation of useful products and systems" and attempt to sue google and other things. =]

    Probably never, because you can copyright "The accidental creation of useful products and systems" and it doesn't mean a damn thing. In fact, it isn't even enforcable because it is not anything substantial enough to copyright. People could reproduce that text left and right, and nobody would care.

    However patenting it would make a huge difference, and you can patent business rules. Although you'd have a lot of prior art, with that whole Pennicilin thing.

    And as a public service announcement: Please, before making a joke, verify what you think you know so you don't look like a tool trying to karma whore.

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  9. google.com threatening non-profit gewgle.com by pheph · · Score: 3, Informative

    Check out the legal proceedings or gewgle.com.