“Dad, what happens when you die?” “I don’t know, son. Nobody knows for sure.” “Why don’t you ask Google?”  Of course, Google isn’t clever enough to tell us whether there is life after death, but the word “google” does crop up in conversation more often than either “clever” or “death”, according to researchers at the UK’s University of Lancaster.  It took just two decades for Google to reach this cultural ubiquity, from its humble beginnings as a student project at Stanford University in California.

Source: BBC Technology News

Date: April 18th, 2017

Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39129619

Discussion

1) “In academia, how often a published paper is cited is a measure of its credibility, and if it is cited by papers that themselves are cited many times, that bestows even more credibility.  Mr Page and Mr Brin realised that if they could find a way to analyse all the links on the nascent world wide web, they could rank the credibility of each web page in any given subject.  To do this, they first had to download the entire internet.”  Although Page and Brin did use up half of Stanford University’s bandwidth to “download the entire internet”, how long, and is it even possible, to “download the entire internet” today?

2) Google was invented in 1998, and it took until 2001 to figure out pay-per-click advertising.  What internet companies still in existence today pre-date Google?