I did a calculation in the mid nineties of the number of documents that the seated user at home could get

to within a minute and found that over a period of four years the number increased by a factor of ten thousand. One order of magnitude came because the disks are bigger, and three orders of magnitude came because of the Internet. Thats a huge change in a short time. If I want to know, for example, whether foodchain is spelled closed up, or if theres a space between food and chain, I can whip over to my workstation, type it in both ways, nd the number of people on earth who have used it each way, and know de nitively where the majority usage is. I would never have known that before, and it happens in almost the same amount of time that it takes me to search my own memory. Its as if I have a strap-on

Representation of the stucture of the Internet Download Young Hyun of CAIDA, using graph visualization tool code-named Walrus

cortex!
Stu Card,1 March 2002

The kind of enhancement to our abilities that Stu Card revels in is enabled for most people by using the Google search engine. This chapter features an interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the spring of 2002, when they were still in their twenties and there was no talk of going public any time soon. They were making light of their achievements and engagingly modest about their designs, but it was already obvious that they had successfully resisted the dot-com madness and had survived through the crash and the period of dot-gone. Professor Terry Winograd teaches computer science at Stanford, and he was advisor to Larry Page when Larry and Sergey were developing their rst prototypes; in the rst interview of the chapter, he talks about the reasons behind the extraordinary success that Google has enjoyed and gives an

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