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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.
... we won't know how to find it otherwise.
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.
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:_Uc4KUIPqXIC: www.google.com/+Google&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
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.
why else would he have named Googles core technology "Page Rank"...
And there was me thinking all search engines were written by people who couldn't find porn without it...
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 do believe the cupboard was 'a rockin', not stationary.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
This was exactly what AltaVista was designed for! AltaVista was created to promote DEC equipment; to show what powerful applications could run on their machines. And it did this job really good.
Brain Tags |
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
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
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?
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?
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.
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).
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!"
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