šŸ’¾ The Invention of Google

Good morning Googly Eyes!

I think weā€™re all fairly familiar with the fact that Google was named after the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

A googol.

Hereā€™s the number 1:

Hereā€™s a googol:

I know what youā€™re thinking.

That illustrated number doesnā€™t actually look that big.

Youā€™re right.

But it is. Trust me.

If youā€™ll humor me for just one second..

The number of atoms in the observable universe is about 1080.

The number of atoms!!

A googol is STILL 1020 TIMES LARGER. Thatā€™s one hundred billion billion times larger for the people that like words.

So put our first observable universe on a human hair:

Ya but like on the cross section.

Thank you.

Okay then this one hundred billion billion times larger number would be like a country thatā€™s 100km wide in comparison:

That two-headed bird holding a globus cruciger (which symbolizes the rulerā€™s dominion over the world nbd) is Montenegro.

So human hair OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE compared to an entire funny-sounding country.

This number is so unfathomably large thatā€¦wellā€¦letā€™s just stop fathoming it.

Because before Google was Google, their company name was actually BackRub.

Itā€™s an awesome story.

1996. Stanford University.

Thereā€™s these two buds ā€“ Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Now unlike you and I (Iā€™m assuming because you subscribe to a newsletter called Smart Nonsenseā€¦), these guys actually liked school.

They were so gung-ho about school, in fact, they were PhD students in computer science at the best, most computer science school in the world.

Now letā€™s get something straight.

Today when you have a question your brain doesnā€™t know the answer to, you Google it.

Or if youā€™re lazy like me and canā€™t click a couple links, you run it through Google Bard. That minx will just spoon feed you the answers to all your problems.

Are they always true?

Usually never.

But hang on young gun!

The internet didnā€™t always work this way.

In Larry & Sergeyā€™s day, the internet was an atrocious place to try and get your questions answered.

You were better off cracking open an Encyclopedia Britannica.

Why?

Well let's say I wanted to search the results for Bill Clintonā€™s 1996 election.

Iā€™d boot up my agonizingly slow IBM ThinkPad 701C:

Hop on a web directory ā€“ maybe Yahoo! Directory or LookSmart ā€” to run my search:

And get backā€“!

Literally nothing useful.

Websites were usually organized by category. So in this case youā€™d look for the ā€œPoliticsā€ or ā€œGovernmentā€ category and then hope you stumble into a website that mentioned Bill Clintonā€™s election.

Oh wait, you found one!!

Too bad itā€™s a random 6 year old that did a class project on Bill Clinton. Not really sure why they were learning about Monica Lewinsky, though.

Okay back to 1996.

Larry and Sergey are sick of this terrible internet search problem.

So they start to look for a new way to organize all of internet search lol.

Something Iā€™ve also spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about when I get a chance.

But these smarties notice something profoundā€¦

Academia.

Kind of.

More like the fact that in academia, you write research papers.

If your papers are good, they get cited by other research papers.

A couple links down the chain, and the best research papers have the most citations linked to them.


You picking up what Iā€™m putting down?

No?

Run that same algorithm on internet page links:

If a lot of people are linking to a webpage, it must be good!

Thatā€™s the basis of Google.

A page citation idea stolen from academia that the guys called BackRub ā€“ a way to analyze the importance of a website based on its backlinks.

The name was kind of silly and the guys had to publish a serious PhD thesis, so they changed the name to PageRank.

Hereā€™s that original thesis:

Thereā€™s even all kinds of fancy math stuff about linking things if youā€™re so inclined to check that out:

So the BackRub idea became the PageRank thesis.

And when Larry and Sergey dropped out of Stanford, the PageRank thesis became Google.

And there you have it ā€“ the 100% true story of how Google came to be.

Hey Bard, write me an outro for an awesome email newsletter about the invention of Googā€“

Oops, wrong browser.

Stay Cute,
Henry & Dylan šŸŒˆ

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P.P.S Click below to watch the Google video šŸ‘‡