Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Without getting fancy, here are some key dates: 1996: Larry Page and Sergey Brin experiment with a new type of search engine.  In those ancient days search engines simply ranked results by how often a searched-for term appears on a web page.  But Page and Brin are after something a bit more sophisticated, a range of metrics that cumulatively determine how important the searched items are on a particular page. They literally used a friend's garage as an office while working on this idea. A cliche is born, the garage-born web business.  1998: The new business is formally created when Page and Brin persuade a co-founder of Sun Microsystems to pony up $100,000 so they can incorporate, set up shop in Menlo Park and hire their first employee.  2002: Yahoo offers to buy out Google for $3 billion.  Google holds to a valuation of $5 billion, and the talks end without result. Also this year, in a display of the mainstreaming of the verb form of their name, an episode of t...

It almost seems quaint, nowadays, the focus of some of us a few years back, at the start of this millennium, on the supposed monopolization of the search engine by Google. Three political scientists coined the term "Googlearchy" in 2003, in this passage: Though no one expected that every page on the Web would receive an exactly equal share of attention, many have assumed that the Web would be dramatically more egalitarian in this regard than traditional media. Our empirical results, however, suggest enormous disparities in the number of links pointing to political sites in a given category. In each of the highly diverse political communities we study, a small number of heavily-linked sites receive more links than the rest of the sites combined, effectively dominating the community they are a part of […] It seems quaint because we've all made our peace with search engines, as part of our normal working life. The action, the controversy, has moved on to social m...