The NFT Handbook

CHAPTER 1Introduction to NFTs

By many accounts, Google was late to the search engine game. Founded in 1998, it was the 24^th search engine to come onto the scene. What’s Google 24^th at now?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google, focused on differentiating their search engine and creating a compelling product from the outset. Monetizing the search engine was an afterthought. Search engines are all about connecting people from a query to a destination. It’s a game of understanding the user’s intent. What do they want to find? Ideally, the engine gets it right on the first search result; otherwise, you’re forcing the user to do the hard work of finding what they’re looking for.

Google’s revolutionary idea was PageRank, a ranking system that prioritized web pages by social proof. The more that other domains link to a web page, the higher it ranked on Google’s search results because there was social proof from other users that it was a helpful resource. Google’s indexing method was in stark contrast to other search engines, which ranked pages by analyzing the page’s content for keyword density.

Backed by this superior theory of ranking the web’s content, Google showed promise of having a better utility than any other search engine of the time. It also attracted the attention of computing pioneers. Before Google was even incorporated, it received its first investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems—a legend in the world of computing. ...