Google and the Power of Myth

What if Google(GOOG Quote) hadn't happened? Would the world be much different?

One year after the highest-profile tech IPO since Netscape hit the market in 1995, the stock remains one of the most closely watched in the tech sector. It's attracted $80 billion from investors lured by the company's promise to organize the world's information. That in turn has generated countless hours of debate on the stock's proper value.

The IPO itself had far-reaching effects beyond Mountain View, Calif. It cleared out much of the stench keeping investors from the tech IPO pipeline. Eventually, it invited speculative trading back into tech shares -- first into Google, then into other stocks like Baidu.com(BIDU Quote). And it woke the world to something that Google had known for years -- search is a very big, very influential business.

But in some respects, the Google IPO has made bigger shockwaves than Google's own innovations. Take Google's greatest (or greatest-known) innovation to date: PageRank, or the family of algorithms that allows the Web pages themselves to "vote" on each other's relevance according to the links among them.

Developed nearly a decade ago, PageRank vaulted the realm of search from the anarchic method of text-based searches into something resembling a more orderly democracy.

Looking back, this has been one of the biggest innovations reshaping the Internet. But legend has it that Sergey Brin and Larry Page merely reverse-engineered the Web as conceived by its original architect, Tim Berners-Lee.

This was no small feat, of course, but it's also hard to imagine that other smart folks wouldn't have tried this themselves -- reverse-engineering the work of geniuses is standard practice among scientists.

Brin and Page's own genius was to stumble on this idea at the very moment when most everyone else thought search technology would be rendered irrelevant by portals such as Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) or Excite.