Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money

This book is the unfolding story of the new technology of Internet
Search -howLarry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google,
discovered a new way to index the Internet's network of networks by
developing Search methods so powerful that they effectively created a
free, public and universal library out of billions of random documents.

It also tells how, together with the help of a brilliant team built
initially at Stanford University, they then found a new way of making
money through contextual advertising - now worth $e billion, leaving
potential competitors, particularly Microsoft, far behind. It shows how
Google's founders have also succeeded in insisting that integrity,
rather than profit, remains at the heart of an enterprise that they will
continue to control, despite the best efforts of Wall Street.

The second half of this book also seeks to explain the central problems
of machine intelligence - the difference between words and their
meaning, or syntax and semantics - which had blocked this kind of IT
development for half a century until Google's founders discovered that
hypertext, the unique feature of the Internet that links documents,
could be measured and mapped to sort millions of apparently similar
pages for relevance and significance.

Google's pursuit of a hugely ambitious and optimistic American dream
that leaves them globally admired, and respected - keeping their
principles intact whilst also creating a fabulously wealthy company - is
a winning blend of luck, jokes, mathematical inspiration, engineering
perspiration, deep technical knowledge of the Internet and, they would
have you believe, thousands of highly-trained pigeons.

The book is 288 pages long, including a comprehensive index and 600 item
bibliography covering virtually all aspects of Internet Search. The
print version of the book comes with a free online electronic version,
with hypertext links to related articles and books - designed to make
any aspect of the history of Internet search easy to find with a couple
of mouse clicks.

The book's author, Bart Milner, is a trained technology journalist and
editor who started using the Web in 1984 (with a 300-baud acoustic
coupler!) and then became a developer partly to try and solve the
question of why computer logic has been unable to deal with meaning and
association. This background has given him an insight into the inspired,
but almost accidental, way that Google's founders cracked the problem of
finding a significant document from billions of unindexed and changing
Web pages in a fraction of a second.

Anyone interested in the future of the Internet and Information
Technologyshould enjoy this fast and fluid story of a company which
has become a flagship business of the 21st century by not conceding any
of its integrity and principles to the huge pressures of commercial
profit, whilst providing some of the most elegant and powerful
engineering solutions eve...