Googling the Web
Googling the Web
Chapter 8 explores the arrival of the World Wide Web, Amazon, and Google. The web allows users to display “pages” of information retrieved from remote computers by means of the Internet. Inventor Tim Berners-Lee released the first web software for free, setting in motion an explosion in Internet usage. Seeing the opportunity of a lifetime, Jeff Bezos set-up Amazon as an online bookstore. Amazon’s success was accelerated by a product recommender algorithm that selectively targets advertising at users. By the mid-1990s there were so many web sites that users often couldn’t find what they were looking for. Stanford PhD student Larry Page invented an algorithm for ranking search results based on the importance and relevance of web pages. Page and fellow student, Sergey Brin, established a company to bring their search algorithm to the world. Page and Brin - the founders of Google - are now worth US$35-40 billion, each.
Keywords: algorithm, World Wide Web, Google, web search, Tim Berners-Lee, recommender systems, Amazon, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, PageRank
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