[Air-l] Re: History of Google
Jay Hauben
hauben at columbia.edu
Sat Mar 5 12:37:21 PST 2005
Hi,
An important piece of the history of Google is contained in the paper
by Larry Page and Sergey Brinn, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine, at
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
In that paper Page and Brinn explain the original motivation for the
development of the Google search engine as an alternative to the
dominant commercialization of search engine research . They wrote
there:
"1.3.2 Academic Search Engine Research
Aside from tremendous growth, the Web has also become increasingly
commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of web servers were on .com
domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997. At the same time,
search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the
commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at
companies with little publication of technical details. This causes
search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be
advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong
goal to push more development and understanding into the academic
realm.
Another important design goal was to build systems that reasonable
numbers of people can actually use. Usage was important to us because
we think some of the most interesting research will involve leveraging
the vast amount of usage data that is available from modern web
systems. For example, there are many tens of millions of searches
performed every day. However, it is very difficult to get this data,
mainly because it is considered commercially valuable.
Our final design goal was to build an architecture that can support
novel research activities on large-scale web data. To support novel
research uses, Google stores all of the actual documents it crawls in
compressed form. One of our main goals in designing Google was to set
up an environment where other researchers can come in quickly, process
large chunks of the web, and produce interesting results that would
have been very difficult to produce otherwise. In the short time the
system has been up, there have already been several papers using
databases generated by Google, and many others are underway. Another
goal we have is to set up a Spacelab-like environment where
researchers or even students can propose and do interesting
experiments on our large-scale web data."
----------------------------
This original academic purpose for Google was turned into a commercial
purpose under the urging of the NSF.
Hope this bit of history helps.
Take care.
Jay
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