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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.
Well given they were building PCs out of lego we didn't expect them to come up with something normal deliberately did we?
there are no accidents, just happy little trees.
Remind me never to give up when a project isn't going exactly as planned
Mind you, looking at what it was originally planned to be, you can see where google came from. You keep going, you Crazy Kids!
Rational thought is the only true freedom
I wish I was lucky enough to have such accidents. The only accidents I have usually involve me looking for a mop and bucket, or writing a big check.
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
... we won't know how to find it otherwise.
Wow, accidents are great! I can't wait to show my boss all of mine!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
many great inventions/discoveries are accidentally invented/discovered.
Newton's Law, gravity constant, etc
Archimedes' buoyancy Law
but I guess I'll never be as successful as google...
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.
Great, now Google is going to grow up with mental problems, constantly wondering if its creators really love it. This will probably lead to Google going into a KFC 20 years from know and shooting up the place. I mean, how well would YOU do if your parents told you that you were an accident?
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.
Google is super l33t
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:_Uc4KUIPqXIC: www.google.com/+Google&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Lots of accidents have created great things, and a lot of concentrated effort has produced nothing worthwhile. Viagra wasn't an accident per se, but it was created for a different purpose than it is used today. The Slinky, Post-its, etc. Things like this happen a lot, and I am sure there is a website out there that compiles just this type of thing. If there were only a search engine I could use to find it...
There is this book.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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...
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
why else would he have named Googles core technology "Page Rank"...
Jerry Yang's original set of links was a Sumo wrestling enthusiast's page...that for a time was valued at $120 billion dollars (!).
I heard another story about this web site that was supposed to be a discussion board featuring intelligent discussions on the subject of science and technology and instead turned into Slashdot.
Ok, mod me down now.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Here in Google groups..
Now can someone find the first mention of searching Google looking for the first mention of Google in Google?
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
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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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...
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
Mmmm I should check Google Labs before saying something that looks so obvios, they already doing it in Google WebQuotes
Well, it's recipient usually is...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
What I need to know is has more advancements in science come as a result of an accident or as the result of some guy trying to impress chicks. And what is the overlap?
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
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. =]
... 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.
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
Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
From my experience with meta search engines, they end up taking up more of your time. Each query gives you the first 10 responses from each engine. That's fine if you are looking for something pretty easy to find (but then you probably don't need a meta engine anyway).
On the other hand, if you are looking for a needle in a haystack, as I seem to be usually, using a meta engine just means you have to wade through that many more pages before getting to the stuff you want. After a few months of using Dogpile, I ended up deciding that my time was better spent going deep into Google. YMMV, natch'.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
It's ok, here's the google cache.
I wonder how many lines of code pagerank really is.
Try one equation, iterated a few times:
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?
Poor Google. Next thing you'll know, it'll be telling Larry Page "You're not my father!"
.
It would be cool if that "i"m feeling lucky" button actually took you to a web page, but I tried it a couple of times and it seems its broken on my client. Every time I'd do a search for a "search engine" the page would just reload.
All your base are belong to us!
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?
"It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass." - HHGG
/syle
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!"
...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?
And yet, somehow we're supposed to believe that without the patent system that "invention" would have never came to pass?
And don't forget the third factor: Information Retrieval's policy is to charge suspects for the costs of retrieval. It's only fair!
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.
Bill Gates: Windows Was An Accident
from the packaging-pure-evil dept.
Bill Gates writes: "Microsoft® Windows® wasn't originally intended to be an operating system at all. We were trying to put pure evil into a software form. After we finally got a working build, we executed it. First nothing seemed to happen. Then the PC rebooted - and loaded Windows®. Our precious had replaced the operating system on the disk with itself, and immediately we realized we had succeeded in our mission. This was going to make us rich, rich, RICH!"
( Read More... )
Check out the legal proceedings or gewgle.com.
I just found something really really neat while browsing among the first mentions of google in the Google news archive circa summer '98.
There was a guy interested in getting a licence on Google technology... And this guy is from deja news... which eventually was bought by google itself... And I learned this in the dejanews archive on GoogleGroups... Ironic, uh ?