The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 118
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Connected to that is the even deeper satisfaction that comes from helping to create the information that we use rather than just passively receiving it. “Involvement of people in the information they read,” wrote the Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, “is an important end itself.”110 A Wikipedia that we create in common is more meaningful than would be the same Wikipedia handed to us on a platter. Peer production allows people to be engaged.
Jimmy Wales often repeated a simple, inspiring mission for Wikipedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. But it badly understated what Wikipedia did. It was about more than people being “given” free access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history, to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wales came to realize that. “Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own,” he said. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111
Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” It also harkened back to Ada Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry. When Wales and his new wife had a daughter in 2011, they named her Ada, after Lady Lovelace.112
LARRY PAGE, SERGEY BRIN, AND SEARCH
When Justin Hall created his quirky home page in January 1994, there were only seven hundred websites in the world. By the end of that year there were ten thousand, and by the end of the following year there were 100,000. The combination of personal computers and networks had led to something amazing: anyone could get content from anywhere and distribute their own content everywhere. But for this exploding universe to be useful, it was necessary to find an easy way, a simple human-computer-network interface, that would enable people to find what they needed.
The first attempts to do this were hand-compiled directories. Some were quirky and frivolous, like Hall’s Links from the Underground and Paul Phillips’s Useless Pages. Others were sober and serious, like Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Virtual Library, NCSA’s “What’s New” page, and Tim O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator. Somewhere in between, and taking the concept to a new level, was a site created in early 1994 by two Stanford graduate students that was called, in one of its many early incarnations, Jerry and David’s Guide to the Web.
As they were finishing their doctoral dissertations, Jerry Yang and David Filo would procrastinate by playing fantasy league basketball. “We did everything we could to avoid writing our theses,” Yang recalled.113 Yang spent time devising ways to ferret out player stats from servers that used FTP and Gopher, two protocols for distributing documents on the Internet that were popular before the rise of the Web.
When the Mosaic browser was released, Yang turned his attention to the Web, and he and Filo began compiling by hand an ever-expanding directory of sites. It was organized by categories—such as business, education, entertainment, government—each of which had dozens of subcategories. By the end of 1994, they had renamed their guide to the Web “Yahoo!”
There was one obvious problem: with the number of websites increasing tenfold each year, there was no way to keep a directory updated by hand. Fortunately, there was a tool that was already being used to ferret out information that resided on FTP and Gopher sites. It was called a crawler, because it crawled from server to server on the Internet compiling an index. The two most famous were named, like the comic book couple, Archie (for FTP archives) and Veronica (for Gopher). By 1994 a variety of enterprising engineers were creating crawlers that would serve as search tools for the Web. These included the WWW Wanderer built by Matthew Gray at MIT, WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, AltaVista by Louis Monier at the Digital Equipment Corporation, Lycos by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, OpenText by a team from Canada’s University of Waterloo, and Excite by six friends from Stanford. All of them used link-hopping robots, or bots, that could dart around the Web like a binge drinker on a pub crawl, scarfing up URLs and information about each site. This would then be tagged, indexed, and placed in a database that could be accessed by a query server.
Filo and Yang did not build their own web crawler; instead they decided to license one to add to their home page. Yahoo! continued to emphasize the importance of its directory, which was compiled by humans. When a user typed in a phrase, the Yahoo! computers would see if it related to an entry in the directory, and if so that handcrafted list of sites would pop up. If not, the query would be handed off to the Web-crawling search engine.
The Yahoo! team believed, mistakenly, that most users would navigate the Web by exploring rather than seeking something specific. “The shift from exploration and discovery to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,” recalled Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!’s first editor in chief, who oversaw a newsroom of more than sixty young editors and directory compilers.114 This reliance on the human factor meant that Yahoo! would be much better than its rivals over the years (and even to the present) in choosing news stories, although not in providing search tools. But there was no way that Srinivasan and her team could keep up with the number of Web pages being created. Despite what she and her colleagues at Yahoo! believed, automated search engines would become the primary method for finding things on the Web, with another pair of Stanford graduate students leading the way.
Larry Page was born and bred in the world of computing.115 His father was a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Michigan, and his mother taught programming there. In 1979, when Larry was six, his father brought home an Exidy Sorcerer, a hobbyist home computer.VI “I remember being really excited that we had a computer, because it was a big deal, and it was probably expensive, kind of like buying a car,” he said.116 Larry soon mastered it and was using it for his schoolwork. “I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document.”117
One of his childhood heroes was Nikola Tesla, the imaginative pioneer of electricity and other inventions who was outmaneuvered in business by Thomas Edison and died in obscurity. When he was twelve, Page read a biography of Tesla and found the story troubling. “He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story,” he said. “He couldn’t commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.”118
Larry’s parents used to take him and his brother, Carl, on long road trips, sometimes to computer conferences. “I think I ended up being in almost every state by the time I left for college,” he observed. One such trip was to the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, which was filled with wondrous robots. Because he was under sixteen, Larry was told he couldn’t come in, but his father insisted. “He just basically yelled at them. It’s one of the few times I’d seen him argue.”119
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