• Question: Is it true google was a test reserching site for students in Calafornia? How did it spread out to the rest of the world? How long has internet been around?

    Asked by robynmae to Sarah on 22 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sarah Mount

      Sarah Mount answered on 22 Mar 2010:


      Google was invented by Sergey Brin and Larry Page while they were graduate students (so, they had already got a degree and were training to be scientists). After that they left to set up the company that became Google. At the heart of Google there’s a thing called PageRank that Larry Page invented. The idea is that when you enter a search query PageRank tries to work out how important each of the websites it knows about are to your query. It does this by assuming that a web site that has more sites linking to it is more important than one that has less sites linking to it.

      The Internet has been around in the form we use it now since the 1990s. At the time there were many ideas about how we could organise information in such a way that people could easily browse and understand it. Tim Berners Lee originally wanted every piece of data on the web to be editable (like it is on Wikipedia) and modern web servers still have these facilities, although they aren’t really used. There was also a proposal called Xanadu, where you would browse a 3D version of the web with similar data linked together (you can download it here and have a go: http://www.xanadu.net/).

      Before all that though, there was a system called the Arpanet that was funded by the US Government and many universities had access to it to share information. Before /that/ people did connect there computers together, but really only within the same building.

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