Alan Jacobs


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Back in dial-up days, when Google launched it was just a blank screen with a box, so it loaded fast. Later, when the dot-com crash came, in 2000, it put venture capital into the fiber optics and servers other companies were disposing of super-cheap. It literally sank billions into the ground and built massive server farms, so it could have redundancy in its content. We like to think of Google as ephemeral because it’s ephemeral in our lives, but it’s actually a pretty heavy industry. There’s metal, wire, and glass at the heart of Google’s success, not just brain power. Google likes to make the claim that two guys in a garage could invent a better search engine tomorrow and wipe Google out, but that’s just not true. There’s more to Google than algorithms.