Текст книги "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution"

Автор книги: Walter Isaacson

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

The first attempts to do this were hand-compiled directories. Some were quirky and frivolous, like Hall’s Links from the Underground and Paul Phillips’s Useless Pages. Others were sober and serious, like Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Virtual Library, NCSA’s “What’s New” page, and Tim O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator. Somewhere in between, and taking the concept to a new level, was a site created in early 1994 by two Stanford graduate students that was called, in one of its many early incarnations, Jerry and David’s Guide to the Web.

As they were finishing their doctoral dissertations, Jerry Yang and David Filo would procrastinate by playing fantasy league basketball. “We did everything we could to avoid writing our theses,” Yang recalled.¹¹³ Yang spent time devising ways to ferret out player stats from servers that used FTP and Gopher, two protocols for distributing documents on the Internet that were popular before the rise of the Web.

When the Mosaic browser was released, Yang turned his attention to the Web, and he and Filo began compiling by hand an ever-expanding directory of sites. It was organized by categories—such as business, education, entertainment, government—each of which had dozens of subcategories. By the end of 1994, they had renamed their guide to the Web “Yahoo!”

There was one obvious problem: with the number of websites increasing tenfold each year, there was no way to keep a directory updated by hand. Fortunately, there was a tool that was already being used to ferret out information that resided on FTP and Gopher sites. It was called a crawler, because it crawled from server to server on the Internet compiling an index. The two most famous were named, like the comic book couple, Archie (for FTP archives) and Veronica (for Gopher). By 1994 a variety of enterprising engineers were creating crawlers that would serve as search tools for the Web. These included the WWW Wanderer built by Matthew Gray at MIT, WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, AltaVista by Louis Monier at the Digital Equipment Corporation, Lycos by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, OpenText by a team from Canada’s University of Waterloo, and Excite by six friends from Stanford. All of them used link-hopping robots, or bots, that could dart around the Web like a binge drinker on a pub crawl, scarfing up URLs and information about each site. This would then be tagged, indexed, and placed in a database that could be accessed by a query server.

Filo and Yang did not build their own web crawler; instead they decided to license one to add to their home page. Yahoo! continued to emphasize the importance of its directory, which was compiled by humans. When a user typed in a phrase, the Yahoo! computers would see if it related to an entry in the directory, and if so that handcrafted list of sites would pop up. If not, the query would be handed off to the Web-crawling search engine.

The Yahoo! team believed, mistakenly, that most users would navigate the Web by exploring rather than seeking something specific. “The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,” recalled Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!’s first editor in chief, who oversaw a newsroom of more than sixty young editors and directory compilers.¹¹⁴ This reliance on the human factor meant that Yahoo! would be much better than its rivals over the years (and even to the present) in choosing news stories, although not in providing search tools. But there was no way that Srinivasan and her team could keep up with the number of Web pages being created. Despite what she and her colleagues at Yahoo! believed, automated search engines would become the primary method for finding things on the Web, with another pair of Stanford graduate students leading the way.

Larry Page was born and bred in the world of computing.¹¹⁵ His father was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Michigan, and his mother taught programming there. In 1979, when Larry was six, his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer, a hobbyist home computer.^VI “I remember being really excited that we had a computer, because it was a big deal, and it was probably expensive, kind of like buying a car,” he said.¹¹⁶ Larry soon mastered it and was using it for his schoolwork. “I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document.”¹¹⁷

One of his childhood heroes was Nikola Tesla, the imaginative pioneer of electricity and other inventions who was outmaneuvered in business by Thomas Edison and died in obscurity. When he was twelve, Page read a biography of Tesla and found the story troubling. “He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story,” he said. “He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.”¹¹⁸

Larry’s parents used to take him and his brother, Carl, on long road trips, sometimes to computer conferences. “I think I ended up being in almost every state by the time I left for college,” he observed. One such trip was to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, which was filled with wondrous robots. Because he was under sixteen, Larry was told he couldn’t come in, but his father insisted. “He just basically yelled at them. It’s one of the few times I’d seen him argue.”¹¹⁹

Like Steve Jobs and Alan Kay, Larry’s other love besides computers was music. He played the saxophone and studied composition. During summers, he went to the famous music camp at Interlochen in northern Michigan. It had a method for crowdsourcing the rank of each kid: at the beginning of camp, kids were assigned chairs in the orchestra, and anyone could challenge the person a seat above them; the two competitors were given a selection of music, and all of the other kids would face the other direction and then vote on who sounded better. “After a while, things would kind of calm down, and everyone would kind of know where they were,” he said.¹²⁰

Page’s parents not only taught at Michigan but had met as students there, so they were only half joking when they told him that he would go there as well. He did. He made a point of majoring in business as well as computer science, partly because of the cautionary tale of Tesla, who could invent but not commercialize. In addition, he had a role model in his brother, Carl, nine years older, who after college became a cofounder of an early social network company that was later sold to Yahoo! for $413 million.

The college course that made the greatest impression on him, Page said, was one on human-computer interaction taught by Judith Olson. The goal was to understand how to design interfaces that were easy and intuitive. Page did his research paper on the display of the Eudora mail client, estimating and then testing how long it would take to perform various tasks. He discovered, for example, that command keys actually slowed people down by 0.9 second compared to using a mouse. “I feel like I developed an intuition for how people will interact with a screen, and I realized those things were pretty important,” he said. “But they’re not well understood, even to this day.”¹²¹

One summer during his college years, Page went to a camp run by a leadership training institute called LeaderShape. It encouraged students to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible.” The institute inculcated in him a desire, which he would indulge at Google, to launch projects that others considered to be on the borderline between audacious and insane. In particular, both at Michigan and later, he pushed futuristic ideas for personal transportation systems and driverless cars.¹²²

When it came time to go to graduate school, Page was rejected by MIT but accepted by Stanford. That was fortuitous; for someone interested in the intersection of technology and business, Stanford was the place to be. Ever since the Stanford grad Cyril Elwell had founded Federal Telegraph in 1909, tech entrepreneurship was not merely tolerated but expected there, an attitude that was reinforced when the engineering dean Fred Terman built an industrial park on university land in the early 1950s. Even among the faculty, the focus was on startup business plans as much as on scholarly publications. “That’s the kind of professor I wanted, one who has one foot in industry and wants to do crazy stuff that’s world-breaking,” Page said. “A lot of Stanford computer science professors are that way.”¹²³

At the time, most other elite universities emphasized scholarly research and avoided commercial endeavors. Stanford led the way in regarding the university not just as an academy but as an incubator. Among the companies spawned by Stanford were Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. Page, who would eventually add the biggest name of all to that list, believed that this outlook actually improved the research. “I think the productivity of pure research was a lot higher, because it had a real-world grounding,” he maintained. “It’s not just theoretical. You want what you’re working on to apply to a real problem.”¹²⁴

As he was preparing to enroll in Stanford’s graduate school in the fall of 1995, Page participated in an orientation program that included a day in San Francisco. His guide was a gregarious second-year grad student named Sergey Brin. Page was naturally quiet, but Brin kept peppering him with opinions, and soon they were arguing about topics ranging from computers to urban zoning. They hit it off perfectly. “I remember thinking he was pretty obnoxious,” Page admitted. “That’s still the case. And maybe vice versa.”¹²⁵ Yes, the feeling was mutual. “We both found each other obnoxious,” Brin conceded. “But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going.”¹²⁶

Sergey Brin’s parents were also academics, both mathematicians, but his childhood was very different from Page’s. Brin was born in Moscow, where his father taught math at Moscow State University and his mother was a research engineer at the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute. Because they were Jewish, their careers were curtailed. “We were quite poor,” Sergey told the journalist Ken Auletta. “My parents, both of them, went through periods of hardship.” When his father applied to emigrate, he and his wife lost their jobs. Their exit visas came through in May 1979, when Sergey was five. With the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, they settled in a working-class neighborhood near the University of Maryland, where his father got a job as a math professor and his mother became a researcher at the nearby NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Sergey went to a Montessori school, where independent thinking was nurtured. “It’s not like somebody is telling you what to do,” he said. “You have to plot your own path.”¹²⁷ It was something he shared with Page. When asked later whether having parents who were professors was a key to their success, they both cited going to Montessori schools as a more important factor. “I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently,” Page contended.¹²⁸

Another thing Brin shared with Page was that his parents gave him a computer when he was very young, a Commodore 64 for his ninth birthday. “The ability to program your own computer was much more accessible than it is today,” he recalled. “The computer came with a built-in BASIC interpreter,^VII and you could right away start writing your own programs.” In middle school, Brin and a friend wrote programs that tried to simulate artificial intelligence by carrying on a text conversation with the user. “I don’t think that kids starting out with computers today get as welcome of an entry to programming as I did.”¹²⁹

His rebellious attitude toward authority almost got him in trouble when his father took him back to Moscow for a visit when he was turning seventeen. Seeing a police car, he started throwing pebbles at it. The two officers got out of the car to confront Sergey, but his parents were able to defuse the situation. “My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow. I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”¹³⁰

Among the books that inspired Brin were the memoirs of the physicist Richard Feynman, who touted the power that comes from joining art to science the way that Leonardo da Vinci did. “I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Leonardo, an artist and a scientist,” said Brin. “I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads to having a fulfilling life.”¹³¹

He was able to graduate from high school in three years and do the same at the University of Maryland, where he got an undergraduate degree in math and computer science. For a while, he and his fellow computer geeks liked to hang around on the Internet’s bulletin boards and chat rooms, until he got bored with “ten-year-old boys trying to talk about sex.” He then got involved in the text-based online games known as Multi-User Dungeons, writing one of his own that involved a mailman who delivered explosive packages. “I spent enough time MUDding to think it was cool,” Brin recalled.¹³² In the spring of 1993, his final year at Maryland, he downloaded the Mosaic browser, which Andreessen had just released, and became mesmerized by the Web.

Brin went to Stanford on a National Science Foundation scholarship, where he decided to focus on the study of data mining. (In a double whammy, to itself if not to them, MIT rejected him as well as Page.) There were eight comprehensive tests he needed to pass for his doctorate, and he aced seven of them soon after he arrived. “The one I thought I was best at, I didn’t pass,” he recalled. “I went to the prof and debated the answers. I wound up talking him into it. So I passed all eight.”¹³³ That left him free to dabble in whatever courses he wanted and to indulge his quirky athletic interests in acrobatics, trapeze, sailing, gymnastics, and swimming. He could walk on his hands and, so he claimed, once considered running away and joining the circus. He was also an avid rollerblader, and was often seen zipping through the halls.

A few weeks after Page arrived at Stanford, he and Brin moved with the rest of the Computer Science Department into the new Gates Computer Science Building.^VIII Annoyed by the uninspired numbering system for offices that the architect had provided, Brin devised a new system, which was adopted, that conveyed better the location of each room and the distance between them. “It was very intuitive, if I may say so,” he said.¹³⁴ Page was assigned to a room with three other graduate students, and Brin made that his base as well. There were hanging plants with a computer-controlled watering system, a piano connected to a computer, an assortment of electronic toys, and sleeping pads for naps and all-nighters.

The inseparable duo became linked, in CamelCase fashion, as LarryAndSergey, and when engaged in argument or banter they were like two swords sharpening each other. Tamara Munzner, the only woman in the group, had a phrase for it: “goofy smart,” she called them, especially when they took to debating absurd concepts, such as whether it was possible to construct something the size of a building using only lima beans. “They were fun guys to share an office with,” she said. “We all kept crazy hours. I remember once at three in the morning on a Saturday night, the office was full.”¹³⁵ The duo was notable not only for their brilliance but for their boldness. “They didn’t have this false respect for authority,” according to Professor Rajeev Motwani, one of their advisors. “They were challenging me all the time. They had no compunction in saying to me, ‘You’re full of crap!’ ”¹³⁶

Like many great partners in innovation, LarryAndSergey had complementary personalities. Page was not a social animal; he could make eye contact with a screen more easily than with a stranger. A chronic vocal cord problem, stemming from a viral infection, meant that he spoke in a whispery and raspy voice, and he had a disconcerting (although in many ways admirable) habit of simply not talking at times, which made his utterances, when they did occur, all the more memorable. He could be impressively detached but was sometimes intensely engaging. His smile was quick and real, his face expressive, and he listened with a focus that could be both flattering and unnerving. Intellectually rigorous, he could find logical flaws in the most mundane comments and effortlessly steer a shallow conversation into a deep discussion.

Brin, for his part, could be charmingly brash. He would barge into offices without knocking, blurt out ideas and requests, and engage on any subject. Page was more reflective and reserved. Whereas Brin was satisfied knowing that something worked, Page would ruminate about why it worked. The intense and talkative Brin dominated a room, but Page’s quiet comments at the end of a discussion made people lean forward and listen. “I was probably a little bit more shy than Sergey, although he’s shy in some ways,” Page observed. “We had a great partnership, because I maybe thought more broadly and had different skills. I’m trained as a computer engineer. I’m more knowledgeable about the hardware. He has more of a mathematical background.”¹³⁷

What particularly amazed Page was how smart Brin was. “I mean, he was just unusually smart, even for somebody at the Computer Science Department.” In addition, Brin’s outgoing personality helped him bring people together. When Page arrived at Stanford, he was given a desk in an open room known as the bullpen with the other new graduate students. “Sergey was pretty social,” Page said. “He would meet all the students and come hang out in the bullpen with us.” Brin even had a knack for befriending the professors. “Sergey had this way of walking into professors’ offices and hanging out with them, which was kind of unusual for a grad student. I think they tolerated it because he was so smart and knowledgeable. He could contribute on all sorts of random things.”¹³⁸

Page joined the Human-Computer Interaction Group, which explored ways to enhance the symbiosis between humans and machines. It was the field that had been pioneered by Licklider and Engelbart, and it had been the subject of his favorite course at Michigan. He became an adherent of the concept of user-centered design, which insisted that software and computer interfaces must be intuitive and that the user was always right. He had gone to Stanford knowing that he wanted as his advisor Terry Winograd, a joyful, Einstein-haired professor. Winograd had studied artificial intelligence but, after reflecting on the essence of human cognition, changed his focus, as Engelbart had, to how machines could augment and amplify (rather than replicate and replace) human thinking. “I shifted my view away from what would be thought of as artificial intelligence to the broader question, ‘How do you want to interact with a computer?’ ” Winograd explained.¹³⁹

The field of human-computer interactions and interface design, despite its noble heritage from Licklider, was still considered a rather soft discipline, looked down upon by hardnosed computer scientists as something usually taught by mere psychology professors, which Licklider and Judith Olson had once been. “For people studying Turing machines or whatever, dealing with human responses was considered very touchy-feely, almost like you’re stuck in the humanities,” according to Page. Winograd helped make the field more reputable. “Terry had a hard computer science background from his time working on artificial intelligence, but he was also interested in human-computer interaction, a field that nobody much was working on and I think didn’t get enough respect.” One of Page’s favorite courses was Film Craft in User Interface Design. “It showed how the language and techniques of film can actually be applied to computer interface designs,” he said.¹⁴⁰

Brin’s academic focus was on data mining. With Professor Motwani, he started a group called Mining Data at Stanford, or MIDAS. Among the papers they produced (along with another graduate student, Craig Silverstein, who would become the first hire when they founded Google) were two on market basket analysis, a technique that assesses to what extent a consumer who buys items A and B is more or less likely also to buy items C and D.¹⁴¹ From that Brin became interested in ways to analyze patterns from the data trove on the Web.

With Winograd’s help, Page began casting around for a dissertation topic. He considered close to a dozen ideas, including one on how to design self-driving cars, as Google would later do. Eventually he homed in on studying how to assess the relative importance of different sites on the Web. His method came from growing up in an academic environment. One criterion that determines the value of a scholarly paper is how many other researchers cite it in their notes and bibliography. By the same theory, one way to determine the value of a Web page was to look at how many other Web pages linked to it.

There was a problem. The way that Tim Berners-Lee had designed the Web, much to the consternation of hypertext purists such as Ted Nelson, anyone could create a link to another page without getting permission, registering the link in a database, or having the link work in both directions. That permitted the Web to expand willy-nilly. But it also meant that there was no simple way of knowing the number of links pointing to a Web page or where those links might be coming from. You could look at a Web page and see all the links going out, but you couldn’t see the number or the quality of the links pointing into it. “The Web was a poorer version of other collaboration systems I had seen because its hypertext had a flaw: it didn’t have bidirectional links,” said Page.¹⁴²

So Page set about trying to figure out a way to gather a huge database of the links so that he could follow them in reverse and see which sites were linking to each page. One motivation was to foster collaboration. His scheme would allow folks to annotate another page. If Harry wrote a comment and linked it to Sally’s website, then people looking at her website could go see his comment. “By reversing the links, making it possible to trace them backwards, it would allow people to comment on or annotate a site simply by linking to it,” Page explained.¹⁴³

Page’s method for reversing links was based on an audacious idea that struck him in the middle of the night when he woke up from a dream. “I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links,” he recalled. “I grabbed a pen and started writing. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work.”¹⁴⁴ His nocturnal burst of activity served as a lesson. “You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set,” he later told a group of Israeli students. “There is a phrase I learned in college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.”¹⁴⁵

Mapping the web was not a simple task. Even back then, in January 1996, there were 100,000 websites with a total of 10 million documents and close to a billion links between them, and it was growing exponentially each year. Early that summer, Page created a Web crawler that was designed to start on his home page and follow all of the links it encountered. As it darted like a spider through the Web, it would store the text of each hyperlink, the titles of the pages, and a record of where each link came from. He called the project BackRub.

Page told his advisor Winograd that, according to his rough estimate, his Web crawler would be able to accomplish the task in a few weeks. “Terry nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me,” Page recalled. “The optimism of youth is often underrated!”¹⁴⁶ The project was soon taking up almost half of Stanford’s entire Internet bandwidth, and it caused at least one campuswide outage. But university officials were indulgent. “I am almost out of disk space,” Page emailed Winograd on July 15, 1996, after he had collected 24 million URLs and more than 100 million links. “I have only about 15% of the pages but it seems very promising.”¹⁴⁷

Both the audacity and the complexity of Page’s project appealed to the mathematical mind of Sergey Brin, who had been searching for a dissertation topic. He was thrilled to join forces with his friend: “This was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”¹⁴⁸

BackRub was still, at that point, intended to be a compilation of backlinks on the Web that would serve as the basis for a possible annotation system and citation analysis. “Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine,” Page admitted. “The idea wasn’t even on the radar.” As the project evolved, he and Brin conjured up more sophisticated ways to assess the value of each page, based on the number and quality of links coming into it. That’s when it dawned on the BackRub Boys that their index of pages ranked by importance could become the foundation for a high-quality search engine. Thus was Google born. “When a really great dream shows up,” Page later said, “grab it!”¹⁴⁹

At first the revised project was called PageRank, because it ranked each page captured in the BackRub index and, not incidentally, played to Page’s wry humor and touch of vanity. “Yeah, I was referring to myself, unfortunately,” he later sheepishly admitted. “I feel kind of bad about it.”¹⁵⁰

That page-ranking goal led to yet another layer of complexity. Instead of just tabulating the number of links that pointed to a page, Page and Brin realized that it would be even better if they could also assign a value to each of those incoming links. For example, an incoming link from the New York Times should count for more than a link from Justin Hall’s dorm room at Swarthmore. That set up a recursive process with multiple feedback loops: each page was ranked by the number and quality of links coming into it, and the quality of these links was determined by the number and quality of links to the pages that originated them, and so on. “It’s all recursive,” Page explained. “It’s all a big circle. But mathematics is great. You can solve this.”¹⁵¹

This was the type of mathematical complexity that Brin could truly appreciate. “We actually developed a lot of math to solve that problem,” he recalled. “We converted the entire web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the web pages.”¹⁵² In a paper they coauthored with their two academic advisors, they spelled out the complex math formulas based on how many incoming links a page had and the relative rank of each of these links. Then they put it in simple words for the layperson: “A page has a high rank if the sum of the ranks of its backlinks is high. This covers both the case when a page has many backlinks and when a page has a few highly ranked backlinks.”¹⁵³

The billion-dollar question was whether PageRank would actually produce better search results. So they did a comparison test. One example they used was searching university. In AltaVista and other engines, that would turn up a list of random pages that might happen to use that word in their title. “I remember asking them, ‘Why are you giving people garbage?’ ” Page said. The answer he got was that the poor results were his fault, that he should refine his search query. “I had learned from my human-computer interaction course that blaming the user is not a good strategy, so I knew they fundamentally weren’t doing the right thing. That insight, the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that was better.”¹⁵⁴ With PageRank, the top results for a search on university were Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Michigan, which pleased them immensely. “Wow,” Page recalled saying to himself. “It was pretty clear to me and the rest of the group that if you have a way of ranking things based not just on the page itself but based on what the world thought of that page, that would be a really valuable thing for search.”¹⁵⁵

Page and Brin proceeded to refine PageRank by adding more factors, such as the frequency, type size, and location of keywords on a Web page. Extra points were added if the keyword was in the URL or was capitalized or was in the title. They would look at each set of results, then tweak and refine the formula. They discovered that it was important to give a lot of weight to the anchor text, the words that were underlined as a hyperlink. For example, the words Bill Clinton were the anchor text for many links leading to whitehouse.gov, so that Web page went to the top when a user searched Bill Clinton, even though the whitehouse.gov site did not have Bill Clinton’s name prominently on its home page. One competitor, by contrast, had “Bill Clinton Joke of the Day” as its number-one result when a user searched Bill Clinton.¹⁵⁶

Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. So Page snapped it up. “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. “But googol was taken, anyway. There was this guy who’d already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.”¹⁵⁷ It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.^IX