CHAPTER 7
Searching for the Right Words
I FIRST MET LARRY PAGE, cofounder of Google, in the lounge at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. It was a rainy April day in 2000, and we were attending a conference on the future of search engines.1 A few years earlier, Page and his cofounder, Sergey Brin, had created a search engine called BackRub, which searched information by analyzing the links that led back to a Web site. The two men were working on it on a shoestring budget, out of—wouldn’t you know it—a garage in Silicon Valley.
Most of the conference participants thought that the way to retrieve information from the Internet had to be similar to the way librarians retrieved books from a bin. In fact, Yahoo!, one of the main presenters, ...
Get Wired for Thought now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
