The Google Story -- Part I

In a previous post I talked about Search, so, naturally, it follows I talk about the company that just about everyone uses to search for something: Google.

Google has been making news lately. Some think bad things are waiting in the wings so it must branch out and find other means of revenue. And with all the talk about Google caving in to the Chinese government after refusing to turn over information to the United States goverment has people wondering what on Earth is going on.

People should read The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed. It is a fascinating look at a company that has completely transformed everything from Wall Street to media to mom-and-pop stores. What started as a Stanford PhD project blossomed into a mutli-billion dollar company that has argubly done more to advance technology in the past five years than Microsoft, Apple, or even the mighty Walt Disney Company.

What is clear from the beginning of the book is that Google has never been about making money but rather about improving upon what had come before in order to give the world information for free. Both founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, stood on the shoulders of old search engines such as AltaVista and improved it remarkably. The whole premise is really simple and ingenious when you think about it. The early Google search engine was based on the premise of citations. Academic papers are often ranked on the number and quality of citations, and Brin and Page used the same thinking while building the their first search algorhythm. They downloaded the Web and ranked pages according to citations, spawning the most accurate search results at the time. Genius! Brin and Page managed to discover the piece of puzzle that had made all other search engines clunky and frustrating by not returning helpful results.

Brin and Page had a golden nugget of information, and after numerious tweaks and test around the Stanford campus, it became necessary to leave the PhD program in computer science and build a company. They had been building their own servers, scraping together spare parts in order to stretch their budget while still manage the exponential growth of the Web. It wasn't clear at the time, but such thriftiness has let them build the most powerful computing system to date. And the system is built from spare parts with redundencies built in everywhere, so even if a part breaks, it is easily and quickly repairable but the engine does not stop working.

In the words of Darth Vader, that is "impressive. Most impressive."

The idea of providing information to the world for free has been the end-all-be-all goal of Google. Naturally, providing information for free put profit on the back-burner, and oddly enough Brin and Page had been against the paid advertising that now generates most of their profits.

Taking this into account and following the developments of Google in China and refusing to turn over information to the US government has gotten me thinking: Google seems to compromise only when there is a threat to their ability to provide information for free to the world at-large.

Stay tuned....for The Google Story -- Part II

Greetings & Salutations, and A Study in Scarlet

First of all, greetings to all in this blog, and thanks for the invitation. As a graduate student in Ecology & Evolution, I’ll try to keep the nerdy biology books to a minimum. But they will pop up . . . now and again. :-)

So I just finished reading A Study in Scarlet, the first story (novella?) in the Sherlock Holmes mystery series by Arthur Conan Doyle. I don’t know if anyone else here ever watched the “Mystery!” series on PBS, but as a kid without cable, I think I’ve seen every British mystery literary adaptation ever made, and the Holmes stories were some of the best. I’ve always wanted to read the actual novels, but I’ve put them off until now, despite owning a rather fetching leather-bound copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

I hesitate to reveal any details of the story, since it is a mystery, after all. Suffice it to say that the story starts out in Victorian England but takes a rather bizarre detour into Mormon Utah (!). The clues and solution are very clever, and Holmes is just as insufferable as I remembered from TV. I have two major observations about this story:

First, Arthur Conan Doyle had never met an American prior to writing this. At least, I hope to God that he hadn’t, because the “Mormons” he spends about fifty pages on sound like the illegitimate love children of Margaret Thatcher and Mark Twain. Check out this dialogue: “No, there ain’t nothing, dearie. You’ll just need to be patient awhile, and then you’ll be all right. Put your head up ag’in me like that, and then you’ll feel bullier. It ain’t easy to talk when your lips is like leather, but I guess I’d best let you know how the cards lie.”

Second, Victorian England (as portrayed in the story, at least) is amazingly similar to modern America. Maybe it’s the combination of insular, country bumpkins and cosmopolitan schemers, or maybe it’s the constant referencing of military campaigns. After all, in the opening paragraphs, Watson reveals that he moves into the apartment on Baker Street in order to recover from wounds incurred while he was an army surgeon in Afghanistan!

In any case, the surroundings of 19th century London are eerily familiar, and the book is quite good, even with the fake Americans. I’ve just started the next Holmes story, The Sign of Four, and it’s even better.

When I grow up, I most certainly do NOT want to be a Handmaid.

It seems that The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is one of those books about which I have heard a lot, but have never read. I decided to fix that last week at the library. And I really, surprisingly, enjoyed it.

The Handmaid's Tale is a story about Offred and her, for lack of a better word, colleagues. She narrates the book, introducing her situation by a flashback to nights spent "in what had once been the gymnasium." It is a bit disorienting, as it should be; the reader is further shoved off-course when s/he reads the following words: "Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts."

Whoa. Who are you, narrator, and where the hell do you live? What happened to you?

Those are just three of the questions that come to mind when reading The Handmaid's Tale. It is written in a series of flashbacks, reflections on the way life used to be, and plain narration of events. It is a style that requires more attention than pleasure reading, but you are utterly sucked in to this world. It sucks you in to the point that when you get to the section entitled "Historical Notes," you shake off the disorientation again and plunge back in.

Offred's story is one of discovery (bleak though it may be), caution and rebellion. The United States, after a massive religious takeover, has become the Republic of Gilead. Militant monotheism is the rule of the land, and those who do not believe in the state religion - among them Baptists and Quakers - are pursued ruthlessly. The new Republic is reminiscent of the Orwellian world of 1984 - it is ruled by Commanders, Angels, Guardians and Eyes, among others. Women are relegated to third-class citizens, divided into the categories of Wives, Marthas, Aunts, Unwomen and Handmaids. They are no longer allowed to read or write. Each group has its tasks and pursues only those tasks. To go outside the boundaries is to risk punishment or death. The story we get in The Handmaid's Tale takes place very soon after the takeover; Offred states that she is one of the people unlucky enough to remember the time before the change.

As a Handmaid, Offred has been torn away from the family and life she knew before the Republic. She has already gone through one of her three allotted terms of service(perhaps two - I was unclear about this after reading the book); when we meet her, she is in the midst of her second (or third) term. Her job is to produce children to boost the incredibly low birthrate of the Republic - even that, though, is not a glamorous job. She and the Commander meet once a month to consummate the deal, though the Commander's wife lays in bed behind Offred and both women are fully clothed during the ordeal. And that's the "prescribed method," folks, not some weird hangup. It is not a happy existence. Offred's revelations of her former life and her discovery of an underground network, along with the suspense of an illicit and somewhat romantic relationship with the Commander, drives the book.

I enjoyed the book, in spite of its grimmness. It has the possibility to provide a lot of discussion in any book group, and it's a fascinating read.

The Search...as in the book title

While being one of millions of people doing Christmas shopping online, specifically at Amazon, they're suggestion system showed me an ad for The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle, along with The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed. Naturally, I couldn't resist!

So I read The Search first. Not surprising there was information I already knew. The beginnings of the Internet, the first attempt at search, search engine AltaVista and so on. What was fascinating, however, was how Battelle strung everything together. He connected all the dots. The Internet started as an academic means of connecting and sharing information. Search was a way to try and find that information but imperfect and quite frustrating. AltaVista was the best thing going but even it didn't spit out the most relevant information.

It sounds so simple, but the Google Guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built an alogrythm for their PhD project that would crawl the Web and assign a rank to each page. However, what has become known as PageRank, assigned ranking based on the age-old academic citation process. The more quaility citations present in a paper, the more likely it will be well received.

Same is true for search, at least in the beginnings of Google. The more quailty links pointing to a site or a page, the higher its ranking. This made it possible for Google to return relevant results. Looking for die casting, the first few links will be to pages about die casting as in metal or the die casting industry, and not gambling. Now more than just quality links are used in the PageRank process, but the fundamental idea is still the same.

What is really interesting and just downright scary, however, is Battelle's idea of the "Perfect Search." His argument is that the interesting stuff has yet to come. He says "in the near future, search will metastasize from its origins on the PC-centric Web and be let loose on all manner of devices" (253). In a sense, this has already happened. If you have a cell phone or PDA-type device that connects to the Internet, you can search for something. Battelle goes further, however, by suggesting that anything and everything will be digitized and searchable.

That's a bit scary. Every piece of information digitized and searchable. Internet Privacy is still in its infancy, but that suggests that social security numbers, personal information, etc. will be on the Web, accessable to anyone. He points this out earlier in the book when he discusses employers and employees "Googling" to learn more about the other. He raises some serious privacy issues as well. Internet stalkers, for example, and how to determine when that line has been crossed.

But the idea of "Perfect Search" is awesome, daunting and almost an invasion of privacy. It has the power to solve numerous complex or simple every-day problems. He uses lost luggage as an example. With "Perfect Search" and every piece of information digitized, there will be a RFID tag in your luggage, and to find it, you just perform a search like you would "Google" a location.

For any of this to happen, however, the "invisble Web" needs to be found by search engines. Battelle describes this, citing Gary Price and Chris Sherman, as being "everything that is available via the Web, but has yet to be found by search engines. Deep databases of knowledge...are walled off from search for commericial or technology reasons" (254). Lexis-Nexis, your hard drive for example, are not indexed by search engines.

Imagine what life will be like when every piece of information can be found in search engines. It's difficult to imagine life without Google, without search. But it certainly holds quite a promising, slippery future.

Rating: G$_G$_G$_G$_G$

A "wicked" read

I'm so totally back into Wicked, Heather. I should be done by next weekend. Do you have the version with the book club questions in the back, out of curiosity?