CHAPTER 1
A Cold, Hard, Google-less World
Need to know how many stacked pennies it would take to reach the moon? Want to know about the latest visual effects technology used to make Star Wars? Need to know if George Washington really had dentures made out of wood?
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FYI:
• It would take a stack of 240 billion pennies to reach the moon!
• Star Wars special effects—Check out this cool link for a peek at how the latest computer graphics (CG) were used to pull off the stunning visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obwG9k6x2us
• Was George Washington’s wooden smile made from wooden teeth? NO. His false teeth were actually made of bone, ivory, and sometimes other humans’ teeth.
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Imagine you can’t google the answers because—well, Google hasn’t been invented yet.
You have two choices. You can sit there on your couch, swallow your curiosity like a bitter pill, and live with not knowing.
Or you can get your parents to drive you to the library. Fingers crossed, the answers you need are somewhere in the pages of a book that’s somewhere on their bookshelves.
But wait a minute. What if your parents don’t know how to get to the library? You’ll have to consult a paper map.
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WARNING! Unless you are an origami dynamo, once you unfold a map, it might never be refolded correctly. Never. Don’t even try.
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Still can’t find it?
It may come down to this: You have to use a paper phone book to look up the library’s phone number. Then, pick up your home phone (the kind that’s wired to a wall), wait for a real, live human being to answer, and then ask for directions. Yikes!
It’s hard to believe, but that was life without Google. Getting information was difficult and took a lot of work.
Horrified? The two guys who thought up Google were just as freaked out as you are. This was the world they grew up in, back in the 1970s and 1980s. And even as kids, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew they wanted to change the world.
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When Larry and Sergey were born in 1973, technology was in a very different place than it is today. In most homes, telephones were attached to walls and could only be used to make phone calls. No texts, no news, no maps—just phone calls. Hope was coming. That year, the first-ever cell phone call was made. But these cell phones were huge, like talking into a brick. Plus, the battery life was around twenty minutes. And then there was the price tag: $3,995! In today’s dollars? That would set you back more than $22,000.
Oh, and about your TV. If you needed to change the channel, you had to get up and physically turn a dial on your TV set, unless you were one of the lucky ones who had a pricey remote control!
Computers had been something used mostly by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in research and academic settings. They were physically huge and could take up an entire desk or even a whole room. But this last thing was about to change—just in time to inspire Larry’s and Sergey’s love of technology.
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But it wouldn’t be easy. Larry and Sergey were born on opposites sides of the planet. And when their paths finally crossed, they didn’t even like each other.
It’s a wonder Google ever happened at all.
CHAPTER 2
Homework
There’s homework and then there’s HOMEWORK. There’s the kind you knock off in five minutes and the kind that determines your whole entire life. As graduate students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin faced the most epic homework assignment of all: the doctoral thesis.
It’s like getting married—to your homework. First, you propose your carefully chosen topic to your professors. With their approval, you dive into the deep end of research, spending hours, days, weeks, months—however long it takes to break new ground, discover something, or deepen humanity’s understanding of your topic. And if that’s not enough pressure, the last step is to present your research to a panel of professors. Professors who are allowed to ask you questions about your work—even challenge you—and you have to defend what you’ve learned!
Larry knew he needed to find just the right topic for his doctoral thesis. And he quickly turned his attention to the World Wide Web. In 1995, the web was only six years old—just a baby. Back then, in the ancient times of the internet, there were only about ten million web pages. And each page generally took thirty seconds to load—an eternity.
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Today the web is made up of 4.73 billion web pages (and counting).
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LINGO ALERT! The web and the internet are not the same thing. The internet is a giant network of computers, connected by cables and wireless signals. This network of networks allows computers to exchange information. The web is all of the content—documents, files, folders, web pages, and other resources—available via the internet, and is connected through links.
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Still, when Larry looked at the web, he didn’t just see a bunch of clunky, primitive web pages. He saw a mathematical graph. Each web page was a point on the graph. And just like the dots on a graph are connected by lines, the websites were connected with links.
Now came the questions. Were these links important? What could links tell us about a single page on the internet? Larry wanted to know more.
That’s when he noticed something interesting: It was easy to look at a web page and see how many outgoing links it had to other sites. They were right there on the page in hypertext, ready to be clicked. But what Larry wanted to know was how many other sites linked back to a particular page? How many incoming links referred to a page? In 1995, nobody knew.
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Hypertext is interactive text that leads you to another document, aka a web page. Oftentimes it’s highlighted in another color. You can simply move your pointer to the hypertext and click to travel to the linked document, or web page, or information.
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Larry explained it to a reporter like this: “The early versions of hypertext had a tragic flaw: You couldn’t follow links in the other direction.”3 Larry wanted to reverse that.
CHAPTER 3
The Long-Lost Nightmare: Search Before Google
Today, if you type “Why is William Shakespeare important?” into Google, you’ll end up with hundreds of thousands of results in only 0.63 seconds. And all those results will be ranked by importance. No big deal, right?
Wrong!
Prepare yourself. This trip in the time machine is going to be bumpy.
Before Google, humans lived in a world where search results were meaningless. You logged onto a search engine. You typed in a basic keyword like “Shakespeare” because the search engine couldn’t handle conversational text. You might be wondering, Where was Shakespeare born? But all you typed in was William’s last name.
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Conversational text is a phrase or sentence that sounds the same way you might speak it. It’s an informal and natural expression of your thoughts or questions.
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You hit return and waited as pages and pages of results loaded, in no particular order. In fact, the very thing you were looking for might be found in the very last result—or somewhere in the middle. Even worse? An hour into searching, you were probably hit with a roar-worthy realization: You needed to type in a different keyword (and do it all over again). You try to scream, but you can’t even muster a whisper.
The problem? Internet searches were based on keywords. So if you were looking for information about horses, web searches would give you every site that mentioned the word horse. And you would have to sit there and load each result, searching for the information you needed.
It was as if you walked into a library and asked for information on horses. And the librarian took every book, magazine, and brochure that so much as mentioned the word. Then he dumped them in random, mixed-up piles for you to riffle through until you found what you were looking for. That was search before Google, a memory few people dare to talk about. What we needed was a way to organize this information.
CHAPTER 4
#Spelling
In 1997, the world was saved from a terrible fate: Back-Rubbing everything for all of eternity!
Hey, can you BackRub movie times for Friday night?
Hey, BackRub Barack Obama.
Now, students, get out your computers and BackRub the first Thanksgiving.
Wow. Let’s have a moment of gratitude for the fact that Larry and Sergey faced the ugly truth: BackRub was a terrible name. Larry realized BackRub simply did not have the snap or pizzazz of other web companies like Yahoo! or Excite. It wasn’t catchy. It wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t cutting-edge. Also it would have been kind of creepy as a verb.
Larry and Sergey turned to their fellow graduate students and office mates for help.
Brainstorming sessions produced lots of ideas. But when their grad school buddy Sean Anderson floated the term Googolplex, heads turned.
Larry instantly thought it should be shortened to Googol. And, no, I didn’t spell that wrong.
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Googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes or 10 to the 100th power. The number googol got its name from a nine-year-old boy, Milton Sirotta. Milton’s uncle was an accomplished mathematician and asked Milton what they should call such a large number. Milton thought googol was perfect in all its silliness.
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Googol is such a huge number that Larry and Sergey felt it zeroed in on PageRank’s enormous possibilities better than any word they could think of. After all, the bigger the web became, the greater the search results. Every additional link added to the web was more data to mine, more citations. Indeed—an ever-clearer picture of any one page’s relevance.
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Just like you mine rock for new materials, like diamonds, you can mine a large database for the sole purpose of finding new information. Even better? Find information that’s never been discovered. That’s the diamond of data mining. And in this case, the data was links; the diamond was the information backlinks offered about any site’s importance or credibility.
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Larry and Sergey thought Googol had the zip, jazz, and snap that BackRub lacked. Plus, they thought, it was easy to type and even easier to remember. So, on September 15, 1997, Larry and Sergey quickly registered the domain name. Problem solved!
Except for one minor issue … Okay, major issue.
They had misspelled the word! G-O-O-G-L-E.
Office mate Tamara Munzner pointed out the mistake the next day. Ouch!
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But let’s not judge them too harshly! Apparently, we can’t spell, either. In 2000, Britney Spears topped the pop charts with her hit “Oops!… I Did It Again.” People began searching “Britney Spears” on Google. The results? Dozens upon dozens of misspellings of her name. Oops! That data—the long list of misspellings—got Google’s attention.
“We noticed a lot of people were interested in Britney Spears, but not all of them could spell,” said Google’s first employee, Craig Silverstein.7 That realization led Google to expand. Not only would Google provide search results, they would begin offering spelling correction, too.
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Staring at Google scrawled across a whiteboard, Larry and Sergey realized they actually liked Googol’s new spelling more.
Their project now had a snappy name and lots of users. Plus—remembering that mother of all homework assignments— technically they had expanded humanity’s understanding of their topic.
In terms of homework, they were killing it. But a large question remained. Had Google crossed the threshold from homework to business? Should Google become a company? Could it become a bona fide moneymaker? This question wasn’t unheard of among Stanford’s graduate students. The campus produced business after business after business.
But Google’s growth and wild popularity demanded an answer—and fast.
Larry and Sergey weren’t sure what to do. The pair were worried that if Google was indeed a business, they’d have to drop out of school to run it.
And dropping out of school to see this idea through … wasn’t their first choice. Not by a long shot.
Copyright © 2018 by Anna Crowley Redding.
