Robin Li, an engineer from a coal town writing software for a newspaper in New Jersey, works out that a link is a citation and files a patent. Two Stanford students take the next step, and the chapter does their sum by hand on a web of four pages. Then Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, sharing one keyboard, find a single flipped bit and learn to build from machines that are always breaking, and Salar Kamangar and Eric Veach design the auction that pays for everything.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Robin Li, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eugene Garfield, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Salar Kamangar, Eric Veach, Noam Shazeer
- The idea it builds
- PageRank worked by hand with a crowd of random clickers on a four-page web, then an index built by dealing the work across a thousand unreliable machines.