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Larry Page: Google Was an Accident
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.
The fact that these guys accidently created a search engine that blows all the other ones away kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?
GMD
watch this
Be careful how you refer to "accidental" inventions... the Newton apple story is considered definitely apocryphal
:)
There are quite a lot of "eureka!" stories about greek philosophers, again with no way of verifying whether they are true or not. It is likely that Newton arrived at his theories after some diligent thinking while at his relatives farm.
In googles case, accidental application of a well-designed system is NOT the same as accidentally writing good code
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Nearly every great idea or innovation is a result of an "accident", though not necessary the type of accident you'd expect. Brainstorming sessions are meant, for example, to drive your thinking away from the norm and into the crazy and bizarre, something you'd probably consider to be an accident if you did it normally as part of the job, but good brainstorming can result in some fantastic ideas. Even in science, we're encouraged not to stay on a single focus and instead read and learn outside your field because who knows what the merger of ideas could lead to. Even from a standpoint of evolution, most evolution advances are a result of mistakes in the genetic code that leads to improved survival. So having the world's biggest search engine be a result of the a mistake is no big surprise and just goes to show what creative thinking can get you.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
What it really serves to point out is that the technology of search engines was based on flawed premises. That is, they didn't really understand what they were trying to accomplish.
These guys didn't accidentally invent a good search engine. They accidentally *discovered* that what a good search engine *was* was an annotation ranking method.
A subtle difference, but a critical object lesson for others trying to "invent" things.
KFG
... for NOT cutting the funding on "pure" research.
I mean, Google's cool, but *peanut butter* was an accident as well, and I couldn't LIVE without my PB&J.
Who knows, maybe someone will stumble across the next peanut butter by accident while researching a cure for cancer or something - then I can die happy.
Well, a cure for cancer would be good too.
I don't think Google was an accident at all. Yes, the engine could be an accident. However, google as a company is not. It was a genius in business sense that simple search page and customer satisfation is the key. Also, it's genius in a sense that some engine was created for something else, but the founders have decided to use it for search (this is a calculated one, not accident). The only accident is the fact that the engine was not used as initially thought.
It was one of those extra credit, summer seminar thingies where the topic wasn't a particular subject, but rather the "creative process."
Dr. Pauling told me the story of how he, and dozens of others that he knew of, had "discovered" penecillin before Fleming.
You see, he walked into his lab one day and found his cultures had been infested with mold. Naturally he was upset. His experiement was ruined even before it had begun. All this mold was killing off his cultures. He had to dispose of them and start over. It seems this was a common occurance in bio labs all over the world if you weren't careful.
It took a particular *mindset* for Fleming to look at his cultures, and instead of getting upset that they had been ruined thinking, " Hey, ruining bacterium cultures is one of the things we're trying to *DO*."
Discovery is often in *how* you look at things, not what you look at.
KFG
Well, what's ironic is that the ranking system is _hardly_ used nowawadays (at least from what I see). I have the toolbar, and I did rank some pages sometimes, but when I think about it, I rarely do look at the google page rank in a website when I visit it, and I wonder how many others do? Note: Slashdot has a high page rank anyways :)
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
And yet, somehow we're supposed to believe that without the patent system that "invention" would have never came to pass?
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.
That's slightly unfair. While all the key work was indeed done by Chain and Florey some 12 years later (for which they shared the Nobel prize but not the recognition), Fleming did do two very important things with his discovery: he ran toxicity tests; and he published. He was not a chemist, and could not have isolated the active antibacterial element. It was just a pity that others did not spot the "wonder drug" potential a few years earlier.