THE SEARCH
How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
by John Battelle
Nicholas Brealey, £16.99; 288pp
£15.29 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

ONE OF THE STAR EXHIBITS IN the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, is an original server used to launch the world’s favourite search engine, Google.

It’s not much to look at — a 10ft stack of circuit boards, silicon and cable that would probably be removed by any efficient office cleaner — but if you are interested in computers it is a piece of history.

In less than a decade, Google has gathered size and importance so quickly that even the mightiest force in the industry, Microsoft, is watching with anxiety. With good reason. As David A. Vise notes in The Google Story, in the seven years since Google was founded, its shares have come to be valued at more than $80 billion (£46 billion). In the same period, Microsoft shares have not increased in value at all.

If Google can give Bill Gates sleepless nights, there is clearly a case for the rest of us knowing a bit more about it too.

In 1995, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two young postgraduate students at Stanford University, California, became inseparable friends and workmates. They had much in common. Both have parents who were distinguished academics in the field of technology, they were technology fiends themselves and they were in the right place at the right time. Stanford gave a start to several of the internet’s household names, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo! and Excite among them.

When Brin and Page’s great adventure began, the world wide web was more like the old wild west — a territory full of tantalising possibilities, but untamed and unmapped. The only way around the new world was the search engine, in itself a brilliant invention, but by the standards of today a cumbersome thing, tending to list anything that matched words entered in the search box, no matter how tenuous the connection, and in any order.

After much stacking of computers and emptying of pizza boxes, Page and Brin developed a system called “PageRank” that used various criteria to help to order results. Most importantly, it used internet links to prioritise its findings. PageRank not only counted the number of links associated with a given subject, it also attempted to value them. The sites with most links pointing to them, so the reasoning went, were the most important and links from those sites were therefore more valuable than others. Thus a link from, say, the Yahoo homepage greatly outweighed one from a fan site.

Providing a database for this effectively involved indexing every page on every site on the web — hence the huge demand for computer power and that exhibit in the museum.

This weighting of search results is what John Batelle, the author of The Search, calls the“secret sauce” that gave what was soon to be called Google its unique appeal.

Brin and Page have made few mistakes in the past decade but the name of their project was one. They meant to call it “Googol”. A googol, to save you looking it up on Google, is a number, 10 to the power of 100 or, put another way, 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

But the misspelling was a rare mistake. Once they had mastered the idea of adding text link advertisements to search results they were on their way to making one of the great fortunes of history.

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