Download 02 Search

Download, the True Story of the Internet was a series made for the Discovery Channel in 2009, and so it quite out of date, but for anyone wanting to know how they internet got started, and how it developed, it is quite essential watching, despite the goofy presentation by John Heilemann.

The second of this series looks at the beginning of the search engine. It is quite a fascinating story, which begins with two undergraduates indexing manually pages they found on the internet.

That was obviously not an economic way to find materials on the quickly expanding internet, and the search engine was born, and the founders went on to found Yahoo! They monetised their pages with adverts, but very glary things they were, and off-putting.

The founders of Google did two things: they found a better way to rank pages and toned down the adverts considerably. Meanwhile, however, they built up one of the largest databases the world has ever seen, and the dangers to privacy started to become evident.