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chaptPTer one Web 1.0 The World’s Biggest Card Catalog In the early days of the web, the Internet was a massive bag of words. There were so many pages that we invented the world’s biggest “card catalogs” to index them and called them “search engines.” They had such names as AltaVista, Dogpile, Lycos, HotBot, Excite, MetaCrawler, Go.com, and Web- crawler and would search web pages for their titles, descriptions, and key- words. In 1997 Infoseek had 1.5 million pages of indexed text, AltaVista had 30 million, Excite had 50 million, and HotBot had 54 million.1 Yahoo had human researchers, and if a search didn’t match a researched category, they’d punt the query over to AltaVista for more automated results. And for a while, these search engines were useful. That is, until Google arrived and blew off the hinges. Google’s results were so much better that everyone started using its search engine and made Google one of the world’s largest companies. Why was Google so much bet- ter? Was it because by the end of 1998, the company had an index of about 60 million pages and edged out the competition by size?2 Or did Google have a secret sauce? Google Leveraged Subjectivity Google was better because its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, moved beyond the idea of keyword search and figured out how to sort good from bad content. They did this by holding a sort of worldwide vote for the best websites and made the winners the top results on Google Search. But Page and Brin didn’t use surveys to hold this vote. Instead, they devel- oped an algorithm called PageRank, which determines a web page to be good