Comments on: Book Excerpt: The Birth of Google

By: John Lin

John Lin — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:39:05 +0000

I think Jon Kleinberg was still a Ph.d. student at MIT when he was at IBM (I could be wrong), not a Cornell professor yet.

By: Chris Zaharias

Chris Zaharias — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 02:40:34 +0000

I think the story of how Google came into its revenue model is as interesting as the story of how the founders cooked up the search engine itself.

By: Zoli Erdos

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:48:07 +0000

Great reading! I had no clue the term PageRank is a play on Larry’s name, I simply thought of webpage … I guess better than BrinRank

By: Steamboat Springs

Steamboat Springs — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:20:46 +0000

Congrats John! You started one of my 2 favorite magaiznes and continue to make me think everytime I visit. I’m looking forward to your new book.

By: RichB

RichB — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:31:45 +0000

The original Google hardware was held together with Meccano (or Lego, I forget). It would be nice to mention this in the article. Google also used to have a picture of this hardware linked from their homepage (this was in the very early days). Perhaps the book should contain this picture?

By: Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:25:12 +0000

Sorry, years in the previous post should obviously be 1991 for the start of the academic Web and 1993-4 for the commercial Web. It’s so long ago now…

By: Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 17:23:05 +0000

Just for the historical record, it’s a gimmick to date the Web (or even the commercial Web) from the Netscape IPO. I first browsed the Web in 2001, and the commercial Web started in 2003 or 2004, depending on how commercial you want it to be before counting. The very reason Netscape’s IPO was so big was that it followed on top of several years of explosive growth of the Web.