Page-Rank and Page

Miles Run:122.9

Miles Biked:103.39

Miles Hiked:8.70
Total Miles:234.99
Stadium Stairs Run*:2244
Steep Steps Run*:1340
Days to Rainier:104
Summit Team:8
Aspirin Tablets:42

I'm over my sickness, feeling better.

I have started reading The Google Story by Vise and Malseed about the first six years of Google Inc. The company was begun by two Stanford grad students who sought to create a better way to gather information from the seemingly endless Internet. Their system used popularity as expressed by total number of links made to a given website and also a ranking of the importance of a website determined by the total number of links made to that website. Existing search engines were good at collecting keyword associations and reporting them to users. Google's usefulness came from it automatic ability to place the most relevant search results at the top of what is reported to a user. Now what is required to properly rank every single website on the entire World Wide Web? Two things, continuous automatic web crawling of every website on the internet and multiple complete backups of the entire Internet. The Entire Internet!

Google maintains these records.

So Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google Founders, focused single-mindedly on creating this search engine and refining it. They brew through tens of millions of venture capital dollars with minimal focus on monetizing their amazing technology. Their first step to make Google profitable was to license their search to other big Internet companies. They had marginal success, but then the world of advertising opened to Google's consciousness. Their simple text only target ads that directly relate to the search results reported to the searcher. This shift in focus and specific verifiable ads allowed advertisers to spend money to garner attention to a product/service that lead to sales and also made Google madly profitable.

Soon afterward, Larry and Sergey became billionaires and shifted Google from a privately held company to the biggest IPO in Silicon Valley's history. That's as far as I gotten. It's a good read, check it out.

Last night I went on a little hike on a dark and rainy night...and 9 other people came with me. So what does that say about them...Or me? It was cold and everyone got soaked, but they seemed to have fun which was the whole point. I got another 4 bricks up to Tiger Mt. It was really fun.