Welcome back to Book Overflow. Today we’re diving into the first third of Steven Levy’s In The Plex, where Carter and Nathan explore how two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, sparked the search revolution. As Levy writes, their breakthrough was a new way to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They called their algorithm PageRank, and it didn’t just count keywords—you could say it “understood” the importance of each link. Early on, they embraced a simple motto: “Don’t be evil,” a promise to keep their growing empire honest. From cramped dorm rooms to multi-billion dollar headquarters, Page and Brin stayed true to one core idea: search could change the world. Tune in as Carter and Nathan unpack how Google went from a research project to a global force, redefining how we find—and trust—information online.
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