Informationalism

The next best thing to knowing something is to know where to find it.

Samuel Johnson127

Chapter Footnotes and Hyperlinks

  1. “Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (September 7, 1709 to December 13, 1784), often referred to simply as Dr. Johnson, was one of England's greatest literary figures: poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, and often esteemed as the finest literary critic in English. Johnson was a great wit and prose stylist of genius, whose bons mots are still frequently quoted in print today.” Dr Samuel Johnson. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . 4 April 2006 19:42 UTC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

  2. Both Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s early biographies are told in The Google Story by David A. Vise. Random House Audible, November 2005. This is the official Google story and makes Sergey and Larry out to be the saviors of the internet world. A much better critical book where I did most of my research on the topic was The Search by John Battelle. Penguin Group Publishers, 8 September 2005.

  3. http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html This was the final paper written by Page and Brin. Even though they never finished their doctorate studies, it continues to be one of the most accessed research papers at Stanford University. It details their approach to searching on the internet and introduces the prototype of Google.

And Then There Was Google

  1. http://www.altavista.com/ This was the favored search tool of the mid-nineties.

  2. Larry Page originally called his initial programming “Backrub” based on going back through the net to see who linked to a particular webpage. Today this type of program is called a webcrawler.

  3. Google. Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results. 4 April 2006 http://www.google.com/technology/ “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”

  4. Google is a misspelled version of “googol.” The dictionary.com definition is: “The number 10 raised to the power 100 (10 100), written out as the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.”

  5. John Battelle. The Search. Penguin Group Publishers, Sept. 8, 2005. 02:45:02 in the audible version.

  6. www.sun.com One of the internet’s most influential companies started by Stanford graduates. Sun created the UNIX workstation and Java script programming. Today they promote the best alternative for MS Office called OpenOffice which can be downloaded free at: http://www.openoffice.org/.

  7. This is called a server farm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_farm

  8. http://www.onlinebible.net

  9. Google. Our Philosophy, Section 6. Google Corporate Information. 5 April 2006. http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html “You can make money without doing evil. Google is a business. The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. However, you may have never seen an ad on Google. That's because Google does not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they're relevant to the results page on which they're shown. So, only certain searches produce sponsored links above or to the right of the results. Google firmly believes that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find.”

Just Google It

  1. Google. Company Overview. Google Corporate Information. 5 April 2006. http://www.google.com/corporate/

Google Is Watching You

  1. http://www.technorati.com/ At the time of this writing, this blog site search engine was tracking 32.1 million sites with over 2.2 billion links.

Google Morality

  1. http://www.contentwatch.com/ We like this particular product because of the multiple features. It allows you to set up various profiles for multiple users and stores on the internet.

  2. Elizabeth Kendal. China's Bamboo Curtain. World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty News & Analysis. Friday 24 June 2005 http://www.evangelicalalliance.org.au/rlc/WEADetail.
    php?ID=497

  3. Andrew McLaughlin. Google in China . Google Blog , 27 January 2006 11:58 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html This is the official cooperate blog for Google.

  4. Pages 109-112 in the section “Who Is My Neighbor?”

Knowledge Puffs Up

  1. Wisdom Quotations. 5 April 2006 http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_wisdom.html I have become the victim of the very thing I am writing about. By searching Google for quotes on “wisdom versus knowledge”, I found this wonderful quote by the great Bonhoeffer. What I could not find after an hour of searching was the reference to this quote. I have several of his books but, alas, I was unable to locate this great quote which is definitely vintage Bonhoeffer. I ask anyone who might be reading this to please send me the original source and I will put it in the next printing. This has provided a good illustration of one of the current problems with the internet.

  2. (NIV) New International Version and The Message Version can both be found at http://www.biblegateway.com. This site is where I find most of my Bible references. About a year ago I found that I was doing more research online than in my resident computer program.

  3. John 16:13 (NIV) But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth...

  4. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York, Vintage Books, 1993. page 60

  5. This site links to software, such as Turnitin and iThenticat that educators can use to discovering plagiarism.

  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

  7. Peer-to-peer means any computer to any computer that is networked. No server is necessary for the activity.

  8. Exodus 20:15 (KJV)

Listen to Greg read this section:

In 1979, when Sergey Brin was five years old, his family decided to leave Moscow. They were weary of the anti-Semitism both his mother and father were facing as academic and scientist. Sergey’s father is a mathematician and his mother is a rocket scientist. They found a way to come to the land of opportunity.128

Unlike most immigrants to America, Sergey ’s family quickly found excellent career opportunities. His father became a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland and his mother eventually used her specialty at NASA.

When Sergey was nine, he received his first computer, a Commodore 64. It wasn’t long before his genius for mathematics and computing was apparent to all. He left high school early and enrolled in his father’s university. When his Science Degree was complete, he moved on to Stanford University and by August 1995, received his Master’s Degree in computer science, again ahead of schedule. He began his doctoral program without a true sense of direction. He couldn’t seem to find a project that satisfied his blended skills and interest, until he met Larry.

Larry Page was born in Lansing, Michigan, also to academic parents. Larry’s father is a professor of computer science and his mother teaches programming. Both are part of the faculty at Michigan State University.

Larry grew up as the typical geekie kid at school which made him somewhat of an introvert. He was often compared to Bill Gates as he possessed some of Gates’ nerdish quirks. Larry even looks a bit like Bill Gates; not a bad thing when your whole life revolves around computers.

Like Sergey , Larry attended his parent’s university where he received his Bachelor of Science degree. He transferred, at the end of his Master’s program, to Stanford. When he arrived at the school, he was given the standard tour of the campus and its programs from a second year student. That student was Sergey Brin.

Sergey and Larry did not hit if off in the way that you would expect, having so much in common. In fact, they argued and fought the entire tour and, for the next few days, over almost every topic they discussed. Nevertheless, this guy seemed to challenge Sergey and it wasn’t long before he considered teaming up with Larry for their Doctoral project. What they did agreed upon was the significant place the internet was taking in their digital culture. They dreamed about how to make it useful. They began their project which eventually put their academic pursuits on hold.129 Together they launched one of the most successful technology companies of all time, Google Inc.

And Then There Was Google

At the time of their arrival at Stanford, the internet was gaining momentum in the commercial world but still had its roots in the academic world. Academia’s biggest complaint was trying to find information on the web. The internet was a great research tool if you could find the papers specific to your field of study. If you entered a search term into one of the most common search tools such as Altavista,130 multiple links would show up that had no relevance to your topic. Research on the web was still very time-consuming and often led to page after page of useless information.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked to solve this problem by developing a method of ranking webpages based upon how they linked to other pages and how other pages linked to them. The challenge was to back-link pages.131 It was easy to count how many links a page went out to, but to discover everyone who was linking in to a particular page became very difficult. And ranking the significance of the page-linking to the website was a huge mathematical challenge. Page and Brin developed programming called Page­Rank132 to do this work.

The next step of this process was to “crawl” the web in order to collect the data of links necessary to rank the pages. They begged, borrowed and stole as much hardware as they could possibly use for this task at Stanford. They started their web crawler, called Backrub, on Larry’s own webpage and it went out into the net. They quickly discovered that this was a much bigger undertaking than they originally thought. Their hard drives rapidly filled with data and there seemed to be no end to it. At one point, half of Stanford’s computer resources were being tasked for this work. Among the University insiders, the new search tool, dubbed “Google ,”133 was a big hit. The ability to index and search the University’s knowledge and the growing number of links became a very useful tool, yet not without its challenges.

A major side effect was the difficulties the web crawler created in the outside world. At the time, webmasters and companies didn’t have a huge desire to be searched. They were suspicious that their intellectual property was being stolen. Also, entire servers were shutting down because of the load placed on them by Stanford’s computers. By the time one quarter of the internet was cataloged, Brin and Page were being gently pushed out of Stanford. It was just too much for the University. Stanford’s computer network, one of the most sophisticated in the world, was also straining under the load and on one occasion ground to a halt because of Google ’s ambitious webcrawling.

Another side effect started to emerge as Google began to be used outside of the confines of Stanford. Outsiders were finding Google helpful but complaints started to come in regarding where sites were ranked on Google. At first this was mostly an academic complaint but businesses were also taking note. Google was beginning to shake up the internet. In The Search, by John Battelle, he remarks on this ranking of sites on the web. . . . . .

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