TechnologyNorth America
The search engine
The web becomes findable
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The idea is borrowed from academic citation analysis: a paper many others cite is probably important. The consequence was that access to knowledge was no longer bounded by what a library held, but by what one company's ranking put at the top — making the question of who decides that order one of the most consequential of the information age.
For children
As the web grew it became impossible to find anything. The solution was to rank pages by how many other pages linked to them — using the web's own structure as a measure of what is useful.
Sources
- Brin & Page, «The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine» (1998)
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