Info Renaissance: Powered by Google
A major catalyst of the European Renaissance was the invention of the printing press. Books could be made cheaply and were distributed to people that didn't have access to such writings before, spurring growth in the economy, human thought, and artistic expression. Thanks to the internet, another type of renaissance is occuring in our lifetime. But the internet with its millions of pages would be impossible to navigate without search engines like Google.
In The Search, John Battelle writes about the search engine revolution that has both changed the face of business and the way we use the internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google while studying at Stanford University in the mid to late 1990’s. It began with a project called BackRub that determined what sites were back-linked to a URL. The two then created an algorithm called PageRank that ranked links in importance in relation to what it was linked to. Page and Brin realized they had created something that would be incredibly useful as a search engine and Google was born. Since that time "to google" has become a verb, and the internet is a useful tool for millions of people around the world. It has spurred technological advancements in the way we communcate with one another, how people do business, and even how we express ourselves. Welcome to the new renaissance.