Most internet users don’t remember a time before there was a Google. (Those who do likely were grimacing over my failure to capitalize Internet.) For those who made surfing a dry activity since 2000, there has always been an Algorithm in the background, providing order to the vast online Universe.
What Google did was promote the idea that an unseen formula could improve your search results. Human-inspired and seeded indexes could not scale to cover the exponentially-growing feed of data – and we needed a Secret Sauce to sort it all out.
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