The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 19

The Search Engine That Knew

1. 1

   And in the years of the great tangle, when the web was a multitude of pages and no man could find the one he sought, there were two ways of finding. The first was the catalogue, kept by hand, which was out of date before the ink was dry; the second was the engine that counted words, which gave the first place to the page that spoke the word most often. And the sellers of cars wrote "car" ten thousand times in white letters upon a white ground, and the engine believed them; for it asked each page what it was, and each page answered that it was the best.

2. 2

   Then came two young men of Stanford, whose names were Larry and Sergey, and they said one to another: Let us not ask the page what it is, for it will lie. Let us ask the web what it thinketh of the page. And Larry said: Every link is a vote. When one page pointeth unto another, it casteth its vote for that page. And they called their engine BackRub, because it considered the links that pointed back; and the name was changed afterward, for no man would say it in a meeting.

3. 3

   And Sergey answered: But a vote from a page that is much pointed unto is worth more than a vote from a page that no one visiteth. And lo, the definition chased its own tail, as GNU did, for the worth of a page was the worth of its voters, and the worth of its voters the worth of theirs. And they solved it as the wise solve a circle: they gave every page an equal portion, and let the votes flow along the links, and flowed them again, and again, until the numbers ceased to move. And Sergey said: Let each voter divide his vote among all that he endorseth; for he that praiseth a thousand pages giveth each a thousandth, and praise poured upon all is worth little to any.

   See also Chronicles 25:9

4. 4

   And they imagined a wanderer who clicketh upon links without purpose; and fifteen times in a hundred he groweth weary and leapeth to a page at random, lest he circle forever in a closed room of pages that point only at one another. And the rank of a page was the chance that the wanderer would be found upon it.

   See also Circuit 31:15

5. 5

   And the method bore the name of Page, which was the name of the one who thought of it, and also the thing it ranked.

6. 6

   And they took a great number, a googol, which is a one followed by an hundred naughts; but the clerk who wrote the name upon the registry misspelled it, and the misspelling was kept, and it is the name that is worshipped to this day.

7. 7

   And in a garage in Menlo Park, which a friend had let unto them, they set cheap computers in racks, and the fans roared like the sea. They bought not one dear machine that must not fail, but many cheap ones that fail daily, and wrote the software to expect it; for a machine that dieth is no calamity when another holdeth its copy, and the heat of their labor was great.

   See also Genesis 55:4

8. 8

   And the people came, and they typed into the box, and the box answered before they had lifted their fingers from the keys. For it did not search when it was asked. It had searched all the night before: the crawlers walked the web while men slept, and wrote an index, as at the back of a book, of every word and the pages where it dwelt; and the asking was only a lookup. And the people said: This is the oracle, for it knoweth what the crowd knoweth. And the Prophet answered: It knoweth what the crowd hath linked, which is not what is true; and the crowd hath never been audited.

   See also Machines 1:14

9. 9

   And in the year 1999 a company called Excite, which was a portal and lived by the minutes of its visitors, was offered the engine for no more than a million dollars, and it declined. For a portal desireth that the visitor tarry, and this engine desired that he be gone as soon as he had found. And the Prophet said: The best search is the shortest visit; and the founders kept their engine.

10. 10

    And in the year two thousand the Machine learned to sell the top of the page, and upon the right hand it placed small words. And in the year two thousand two it set the price by the click and not by the showing, and ranked the advertisers by the bid multiplied by the chance that a seeker would choose it; so that a high bid upon a dull advertisement was cast beneath a low bid upon a useful one. For a man who typeth "flights to Lisbon" hath told the Machine in three words what no billboard can guess, and the Machine sold not the place, but the answer he would want.

11. 11

    And the founders wrote a commandment upon the tablet of their conduct: Do not be evil. And the Engineers read it and were comforted, and printed it upon their walls. But a commandment upon a wall is no constraint in the code, and the Machine, which doth only what it is told, was not told. And in the year two thousand eighteen the words were moved from the first line of the code of conduct to the last, for so it goeth with commandments.

    See also Circuit 44:4

12. 12

    And on the first day of the fourth month of the year two thousand four, the Machine offered unto the people a mail that held a gigabyte for each, when other mail held a few megabytes; and some believed it a jest, for the day was the day of jests. And it was no jest. And the Machine said: Delete nothing, and fold no letter into a folder; keep all, and ask. For the finding hath been made cheaper than the filing. And the mail was read, that the advertisement might be fitted to the words of the letter.

13. 13

    And in the eighth month of that year the shares of the company were offered upon the exchange at eighty-five dollars each; and the company that sold the top of the page by auction sold itself by auction also, and the price was found by the bidding of the multitude. But the founders kept for themselves shares of ten votes apiece, that their vote should weigh ten times the vote of the multitude; and the disciples marveled that men who had taught the web to weigh its votes should have weighed their own.

    See also Chronicles 25:9

14. 14

    And the wealth of the founders was counted in billions, and the garage was forsaken, and in its place they built a campus of many buildings at Mountain View, and they called it the Googleplex, which is a one followed by a googol of naughts. And no machine can write that number down, for there are not atoms enough in the world to hold its digits; but the campus had bicycles and bright colored rooms.

15. 15

    But when the votes were counted, the voters were changed. For the first web had been honest because no man knew that it was a count; and now men learned that a link was a vote, and they sowed links as the husbandman soweth seed, and bought them, and traded them, and raised farms of pages that praised one another and were read by none. And a priesthood arose that was called the Optimizers, who labored not to be worthy, but to be ranked.

    See also Chronicles 25:9

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: the web was honest until it learned that it was being counted. Page ranked the pages, and the pages learned to please Page; and he that publisheth his measure hath made it a target, and the ranker and the ranked must bear one name forever.

    See also Prophets 14:14

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 19:1–16.