Extract from Google's Playboy Interview
Playboy has an extract from the September issue interview with Google's Page and Brin, on their website. This link will take you to the extract, complete with adult content. Alternatively, we've pasted it below.

PLAYBOY: What does Google do that early search engines didn't?

BRIN: Before Google, I don't think people put much effort into the ordering of results. You might get a couple thousand results for a query. We saw that a thousand results weren't necessarily as useful as 10 good ones. We developed a system that determines the best and most useful websites. We also understood that the problem of finding useful information was expanding as the web expanded. In 1993 and 1994, when Mosaic, the predecessor of Netscape, was launched, a "What's New" page listed new websites for the month and then, when more began appearing, for the week. At the time, search engineers had to deal with a relative handful of sites, first thousands and then tens of thousands. By the time we deployed our initial commercial version of Google in late 1998, we had 25 million or 30 million pages in our index. Today we have billions -- more than 4 billion, in fact. That volume requires a different approach to search technology.

UPDATE: Someone at CNet went out and bought Playboy. They have more excerpts.
Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |