GOOGLING—FOR FUN AND PROFIT PART 1

WHAT WITH RESEARCHING ONE THING AND ANOTHER, I am a regular user of the Google search engine. So it is with compelling interest that I read Donald MacKenzie’s “The Future of Search,” London Review of Books, November 20, 2025. From this I glean the following tidbits, presented here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow. (Gimme a break: MacKenzie’s article is well worth its 5159 words.)

Quite Amazing. MacKenzie observes, “Type a few words into Google and hit ‘return.’ Almost instantaneously, a list of links will appear. To find them, you may have to scroll past a bit of clutter—ads and, these days, an A.I. Overview—but even if your query is obscure, and mine often are, it’s nevertheless quite likely that one of the links on your screen will take you to what you’re looking for. That’s striking, given that there are probably more than a billion sites on the web, and more than fifty times as many webpages.”

A Brief History of Search Engines. “On the foundation of that everyday miracle,” MacKenzie recounts, “a company currently worth around $3 trillion was built, yet today the future of Google is far from certain. It was founded in September 1998, at which point the world wide web, to which it became an indispensable guide, was less than ten years old.”

I honestly don’t recall my first Google encounter at R&T. I do recall often seeking .edu as the most reliable links. And, to some extent, I still do.

MacKenzie continues, “Google was by no means the first web search engine, but its older competitors had been weakened by ‘spamming,’ much of it by the owners of the web’s already prevalent porn sites. Just as Google was to do, these early search engines deployed ‘web crawlers’ to find websites, ingest their contents and assemble an electronic index of them.”

Among early search engines, I recall Yahoo! (still around) and Ask Jeeves (ditto, as Ask.com).

Fooling the Web Crawlers. However, MacKenzie notes, “A spammer such as the owner of a porn site could plaster their site with words which, while irrelevant to the site’s content, were likely to appear in web searches. Often hidden from the users’ sight—encoded, for example, in the same colour as the background—those words would still be ingested by web crawlers. By the late 1990s, it was possible, even usual, to enter an entirely innocent search query—‘skiing,’ ‘beach holidays,’ ‘best colleges’—and be served up a bunch of links to porn.”

Rating Website Quality. “In the mid to late 1990s,” MacKenzie relates, “Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were Ph.D. students at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. One of the problems Page was working on was how to increase the chances that the first entries someone would see in the comments section on a website would be useful, even authoritative. What was needed, as Page told Steven Levy, a tech journalist and historian of Google, was a ‘rating system.’ ”

How Good You Are is Determined by Who Links to You. “In thinking about how websites could be rated,” MacKenzie says, “Page was struck by the analogy between the links to a website that the owners of other websites create and the citations that an authoritative scientific paper receives.”

A Hugely Ambitious Project. MacKenzie notes, “The logic of what Page and Brin were setting out to do involved them in a hugely ambitious project: to ingest and index effectively every website in existence. That, in essence, is what Google still does.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll continue these gleanings of MacKenzie’s cogent analyses. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025