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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.

15 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. great inventions by very · · Score: 4, Interesting

    many great inventions/discoveries are accidentally invented/discovered.

    Newton's Law, gravity constant, etc
    Archimedes' buoyancy Law

    1. Re:great inventions by abhinavnath · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well in Newton's case, he himself wrote that the idea of gravity was "occasioned by the fall of an apple from a tree", and the sight of the full moon in the sky. He realized (he wrote) that the same force had to govern the moon's rotation (and Kepler's Laws) and the fall of the apple. I think it unlikely that it actually hit him on his head.

      I think it unfortunate that Newton is often credited with a discovery instead of an invention. Yes, he discovered gravity, but he invented the Theory of gravity.

      Google is a little different. Brin & Page were able to see the possibilities arising from their more-or-less failed experiment to annotate the web. You're right in that they wrote good code, but to do the wrong thing. Their "moment of brilliance" was in seeing that this code could be used for something entirely different than they had intended.

      --
      My other sig is also a .Porsche
  2. accidents by dattaway · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Accident or not, I'm glad it happened. Search engines at that time left much to be desired. Google was simply magic. If I wanted something, it would magically appear on the first link.

  3. One of many examples by insensitive+claude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The guys who created the Expand Accellerator were actually trying to develop a new encryption method when they stumbled across a method to increase virtual bandwidth.

  4. And Yahoo started as a Sumo resource by Ars-Fartsica · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Jerry Yang's original set of links was a Sumo wrestling enthusiast's page...that for a time was valued at $120 billion dollars (!).

  5. First mention of Google from Google? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here in Google groups..

    Now can someone find the first mention of searching Google looking for the first mention of Google in Google?

  6. Re:Before google by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not really, previous search engines did well what they were intended to do. They searched the web focusing in each site as isolated in the web.

    But used the wrong point of view, they didn't see the web so interlinked that searching based in how much linked a site is could be a measure of how much desirable could be find that site.

    Sometimes the better solutions are just viewing a hard problem from another point of view.

  7. I wonder... by oZZoZZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After reading all the information on google's technogoly, I wonder how many lines of code pagerank really is.

    Do you figure it's 50k+lines, or something very simple, and only a few hundread lines

    For some reason, I don't think the pagerank algorithm is more than 1000 lines of code... I know lines of code isn't really a defining characteristic of anything, but it's still interested...

  8. NOW I understand their blog move by egghat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the article


    Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

    "Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

    Now think about blogging with page ranking applied. Might be much more useful than normal blogging. As search engines with PageRank are compared to normal search engines.

    Bye egghat.

    --
    -- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
  9. annotate the web by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Still there is space for such a system, something that centralizes comments about sites. They could put a link for comments about search results, and link discussion sites (slashdot and similars, weblogs, usenet, etc) that show links to this sites as possible comments.

    Mmmm I should check Google Labs before saying something that looks so obvios, they already doing it in Google WebQuotes

  10. Eigenvalue? Sounds German... by yerricde · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder how many lines of code pagerank really is.

    Try one equation, iterated a few times:

    PageRank(i) = (0.15/N) + (0.85)*Sum(PageRank(j) where j is in {pages that point to i})

    However, the PageRank value is only one aspect of Google's ranking; for brand-new pages that haven't had time to gather links yet, Google seems to use straight textual ranking.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  11. Not only an accident by jaaron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Google's not only an accident, but also a misspelling: It should be googol.

    Although I'm kinda glad it got misspelled though, because google is much cooler that googol.

    Interesting googol fact from whatis.com:

    Later, another mathematician devised the term googolplex for 10 to the power of googol - that is, 1 followed by 10 to the power of 100 zeros. Frank Pilhofer has determined that, given Moore's Law (which is that computer processor power doubles about every 1 to 2 years), it would make no sense to try to print out a googleplex for another 524 years - since all earlier attempts to print a googleplex out would be overtaken by the faster processor.

    --
    Who said Freedom was Fair?
  12. Re:Actually... by wiresquire · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    ...the Information Retrieval (IR) geeks reckon there's 2 major factors. You are correct that one of those is relevance, which is known as precision. And the other is recall. Think of recall as getting all the relevant results.

    One of the tricks that can be used to cull irrelevant results is to cut down the total number of results. The IR dudes quickly started playing the numbers. Showing the best 20 results is better than showing the top 100 with 60 of those being irrelevant.

    I like to think of these as accuracy and completeness.

    I used to occasionally browse through TREC. Seems like they have locked up the past results nowadays...

    --

    So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?

  13. There is something other than Google? by AsmordeanX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A friend of my brother-in-law was suprised to hear that there were other search engines in existance.

    He thought that Google was just a standard, like HTML, FTP, Gopher, or NNTP.

    That was quite the little accident they had.

  14. Re:Before google by Isofarro · · Score: 4, Interesting
    kinda says something about the laughable state of search engine technology before google, don't it?


    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.

    Its good, however, to see that Google aren't resting on their laurels, as Google Labs amply demonstrate. I like Google sets, which makes good use of list markup, like when the shuttle crashed last week I was trying to remember the names of all the space shuttles, so entering Colombia, Challenger and Enterprise into Google Sets gave me the names of the other three shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis -- a useful tool indeed.

    Considering Google's purchase of Blogger announced this past weekend, I'm looking forward to more semantically based search abilities - since blogs are by their nature very structured (especially those with RSS or XML feeds).