Infotrade

It was a great search engine but a money-losing business—until it borrowed an idea from its biggest rival. The idea that made Google the world’s greatest search engine was all Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But the idea that set it on the path to becoming the world’s greatest  company  wasn’t theirs originally. It was borrowed, with some key modifications, from their biggest early rival. In September 1998, Page and Brin founded Google based on an algorithm called PageRank that they had developed as Stanford Ph.D. students. Other search engines ranked pages based on the relevance of the text they contained, which allowed spammers to game the system by filling their pages with commonly searched keywords. PageRank dived much deeper, evaluating sites’ authority and influence based on the number of other authoritative and influential sites that linked to them. Suddenly a search for “Honda” turned up Honda.com instead of, say, a porn site that had copied the word ...