Larry Page: Google Was an Accident

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Larry Page: Google Was an Accident

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday February 17, 2003 @04:43AM 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.

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Before google by GuyMannDude · 2003-02-17 04:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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1. Re:Before google by terbo · 2003-02-17 05:13 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  *cough* the laughable state of technology.
  *cough* the laughable state of human existence.
  
  we were just an accident, you know?
  
  --
  If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
2. Re:Before google by GGardner · 2003-02-17 05:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  What's laughable (now) is that the previous search engines all where trying to optimize the wrong problems. Altavista bragged about how DEC Alpha CPUs, with their 64 bit CPUs returned results faster. Others bragged about covering more of the web. Others hyped the fact that they returned the most results.
  Google reminded them all that the most important thing in a search engine isn't how fast it runs (though that's important), but that it returns the most relevant results first.
  I think that this lesson holds for many projects and companies today.
3. Re:Before google by GGardner · 2003-02-17 05:57 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  This was exactly what AltaVista was designed for!
  I know that AltaVista was created by DEC, but instead of focusing on how fast their search was, they should have spent more effort on how effective the search was. That way, their message could have been "our alphas are so fast, we can do more than search, we can also sort well". After google, the message everyone understood was that, "Alphas may be fast, but they get beaten by better software running on commodity hardware".
  BTW, every vi hacker should know that using :x saves keystrokes over :wq
4. Re:Before google by cyb97 · 2003-02-17 06:12 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  and still after being the no1 searchengine doesn't spawn pop-ups...
  even more amazing
5. Re:Before google by timeOday · 2003-02-17 08:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Google have a top-notch system but the whole indexing thing is still laughable. They are not really taking advantage of structured markup in evaluating keywords - they extract the same information as if it were a plain text file sans markup. Yeah, sometimes top-level headers and link text is used, but that's it really.
  I don't think there's all that much information in structured markup. Certainly no where near as much as in the boring old plain text, so why focus on semantic analysis of the tags rather than the text?
Re:great inventions by banana+fiend · 2003-02-17 04:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Its funny... by elmegil · 2003-02-17 05:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

Uh....dogpile is simply a meta-search engine, and it searches google and many of the others. Seems to me that it makes perfect sense in some cases to use a higher level search instead of relying on google (which while great is NOT always the best for a particular thing you're looking for).

--
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Well yes and no by kfg · 2003-02-17 05:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
This is a great argument... by masq · 2003-02-17 05:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

... 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 once took a course with Dr. Linus Pauling by kfg · 2003-02-17 05:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
What's Ironic is .... by Khalidz0r · 2003-02-17 06:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 :)

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"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
Patents suck by anthony_dipierro · 2003-02-17 06:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

And yet, somehow we're supposed to believe that without the patent system that "invention" would have never came to pass?
1. Re:Patents suck by TheKey · 2003-02-17 09:02 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Well, unique and innovative patents aren't bad. They only last a few years anyhow. Absurd patents is the problem.
  
  --
  My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
Re:Flemming and Penicillin by Uri · 2003-02-17 08:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.