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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.

5 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:great inventions by banana+fiend · · 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.
  2. Well yes and no by kfg · · 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

  3. Re:Before google by GGardner · · 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.

  4. This is a great argument... by masq · · 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.

  5. I once took a course with Dr. Linus Pauling by kfg · · 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