John Battelle’s The Search
Wired is carrying an article today excerpted from John Battelle‘s new book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. The excerpt covers the meeting of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and retells the much-told story of the creation of PageRank.
From the article, a brief digression into the basis of PageRank–Citations:
Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author’s argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there’s even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.