When I started my PhD courses, one of our professors from a Greek university told me about interesting research done by two students from Stanford University. These students, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, laid the foundations for building the search engine that is today the absolute emperor of the Internet kingdom.

At that time there were much better developments in the scientific literature for creating content search algorithms. onlinevarious suggestions for ordering and finding the needle in a newborn’s haystack world Wide Webbut only one, Google, has dominated the world.

Bring order to the web

In 1999, Larry and Sergei, in collaboration with two other researchers, published a paper that is part of the history of technology:PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. In that article they said Page Rankingcharacterizing web pages as objective and mechanical, a method for engaging effectively in human interest and attention.

His suggestion was a new way to order information. Essentially, this is the foundation of a search engine’s job: reviewing entire web pages to gather available information; model it, and finally, show us the links to the pages closest to our query. But Page Ranking It contained an important element that differed from other search engines in development and placed it first in the race.

Key: page link resources

innovation Page Ranking The way you order is how you choose the first thing you serve. The algorithm weights the importance of the resources linking to each page in the score. In the first decade of this century, a Evreka!An important idea that sparked the engine of the Google machine.

For example, if the page contains information about universities, a link from another university’s website, such as www.deusto.es, would be more important than a link from a mechanic. But if the knowledge is about mechanics, the better (and the more the better) if the workshops connect it.

Until then, the task of ordering and prioritizing so much information required a large amount of time and computer resources. Google has reduced these costs so much and been so efficient in the process that companies have welcomed it with a red carpet.

Pressure from Google to big tech companies

in his book Thanks for being late…journalist Thomas L. Friedman underlines two scientific papers that analyze Google’s evolution as the foundation that allowed the takeoff of many of the leading tech companies that now run the world’s wealthiest.

Scientists noted that Google allows large amounts of data to be processed simultaneously on multiple computers(MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters and files could be viewed as if they were on a single computer, despite being scattered across many different servers. What does it mean? Hyper efficiency and savings, a transformative change in the way we work with large volumes of information.

The revolution brought by Google: ordering the world’s knowledge

In the pre-Google era, the trend was to process information on large servers that quickly reached their limits. No matter how big a processor was, it was overwhelmed at a given moment. Google, on the other hand, is almost endless. It enables information to be sorted and stored on ordinary networked computers that operate like a single computer. This is a Evreka! moreover, conquering domestic internet companies and launching them with an ambitious goal: “to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful to all users”.

Step by step, company company, user user, everyone chose Google.

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And the money began to pour

It definitely started when Google found a way to monetize all the stored information through ads. Although this was not their initial idea, given the growth and financing needs they experienced, in 2000 they Google adsnow Google ads.

This platform allows it to display personalized ads to each user based on the information it has about them, through a real-time auction system. The system meant, among other actions, that if Google were a state, it would have more money than forty African countries combined.

The dark side of too much power

But the machine has problems. To be as effective as possible, monitoring of actions taken by the user must be very high, which undermines the fundamental right of privacy (although Google claims that data does not leave the company).

Also, Google is the judge and part of the entire chain. You have the world’s most used mobile operating system (Android), the most used web browser, a large advertiser network and the key to the door to the internet: the search engine.

The discussion today does not focus solely on what Google assumes as an algorithm in terms of performance optimization and efficiency. Also on ethics and fundamental rights.

If it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist.

The search engine offers A priori Results that better match users’ expectations, but don’t necessarily have to be objectively better than those that don’t appear on Google. Therefore, the only information that matters is what the search engine chooses. There is no rest.

Google is at the center of the explosion of knowledge capture, attracting top professionals from diverse fields, not just technological ones. The user has gotten used to the results Google gives and is looking no further. If something isn’t on Google, it certainly doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t matter if it is.

As my PhD professor said, there were much better suggestions in the scientific literature for building search engine algorithms. But Google won the race of the century by a long shot.

Borja Sanz Urquijo, Assistant Professor at the University specializing in Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, University of Deusto

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.