In 1998 two Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine - and buried in it a warning that advertising-funded search would be "inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers." Then they went out and built the largest advertising-funded search engine that has ever existed. What happened in between is one of the defining stories of our age.
E.B Cohen tells the whole story of search - not just of a company, but of humanity's oldest hunger, the hunger to find things out. It begins long before Google, with Vannevar Bush's dream machine and the pre-Google engines that fumbled toward an answer: Archie, Lycos, the mighty AltaVista, Yahoo's hand-built directory. It follows Larry Page and Sergey Brin from a Stanford dorm to a Menlo Park garage, and the deceptively simple idea - that a link is a vote - that let them bring order to the chaos of the web.
From PageRank to the ad auction that quietly became the most profitable machine in commercial history; from the infrastructure that reinvented computing to the empire of free products - Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, YouTube - that orbited the search engine; from the birth of Alphabet to the Transformer that Google itself invented and that would come back to threaten it; to the ChatGPT shock, the scramble to answer with AI, and the 2024 courtroom where a judge ruled the machine had become an illegal monopoly.
Rigorous, vivid, and even-handed about privacy, power, and the price of "free," this is the story of how finding out stopped being hard - and what we handed over in exchange.
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