Breakpoint_Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain

by Jeff Stibel

  IV

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about social media is the lack of a hierarchical structure. Because no one is in charge, users inevitably take control and make the network their own. The term “tweet” was coined not by Twitter but by users, and Twitter’s now infamous hashtag (the # sign) was also created organically, by users for users. The lack of an organizational structure certainly allows for many blunders and mistakes, but it also enables tremendous efficiency, growth, and progress.

  Like social networks, none of the world’s millions of ant colonies has any type of central command. Despite the fact that we call her the queen, the mother ant does nothing more than lay eggs. There is no parent, no president, no central command. As a CEO of a large company, it is hard not to find this intriguing, with some pretty serious suggestions for organizational management. Are we better off just laying eggs (ideas?) and staying out of the way?

  True networks don’t have leadership, and true networks seem to last longer than companies, governments, and other hierarchies. To study the greatest organizations is to study networked organizations.

  Six

  Chiefs | Search | Context

  In 1999 Marissa Mayer graduated from Stanford with two computer science degrees and a specialization in artificial intelligence. Faced with an overwhelming 14 job offers, it would have been a no-brainer for Mayer to accept the most lucrative position, possibly the one from Oracle or Carnegie Mellon or even McKinsey. Yet the one offer that intrigued her most was from Google, a startup with only 19 employees and even less revenue, but overflowing with passion and excitement. When weighing her options, Mayer says she thought back to other good life decisions she had made and analyzed what they had in common. “In each case, I’d chosen the scenario where I got to work with the smartest people I could find . . . And the other thing was I always did something that I was a little not ready to do. In each of those cases, I felt a little overwhelmed by the option. I’d gotten myself in a little over my head.”

  So Mayer passed on the prestigious university job and the lucrative consulting gig and started work at Google headquarters in a small office on a quiet street in Palo Alto close to Stanford’s campus. She joined as employee number 20 and took on the task of designing a homepage for the budding search engine.

  After analyzing the designs of hundreds of search engines and websites, Mayer decided that a change was needed. Back then, most websites were filled with information, links, and clutter. There was little organization, and the structure was complex. Simplicity, she decided, would be Google’s differentiator. Mayer was the one who created the now ubiquitous Google homepage: a search box and a button, nothing more. The “I’m feeling lucky” button came later, but little has changed since then in the interface of the search engine. Mayer explained it this way: “Google should be . . . clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.”

  Mayer and the team at Google famously upended the world of search, the gateway to the World Wide Web. Their innovations started with a new search algorithm, one that replicated the way the brain works. They compared website links to neuronal links and completely reorganized the web as a result. But they went a step further and focused on how the searchers (computers) worked with those who were searching (us mortals). It worked. They toppled the old regimes, led by Yahoo! and a fleet of other sites that no longer exist.

  So it came with great irony when Yahoo! asked Marissa Mayer to be their new CEO in 2012. By 2012, most people ruled out Yahoo! entirely. Once a mighty company, Yahoo! was dying, evidenced by declining revenues, de minimis market share, and declining users. Yahoo! had massively overshot the breakpoint of their environment, and everyone—including the company’s leadership—had left the search business for dead. The team went so far as to pawn off the entire search product to their once formidable competitor, Microsoft. Yet Mayer accepted the role. She clearly saw things differently.

  And maybe we should as well. It is easy to rule out companies simply because they seem behind the curve, but in business it is often as bad to be early as it is to be late. Sometimes a company is actually ahead of the curve and we just can’t see it. Sometimes we see decline when what is actually happening is a technology overshooting on its way to equilibrium.

  We also often forget that people are behind most technological innovations and that a great leader and visionary can change everything. Consider Apple. The company was a shining star that quickly faded. The story unfolded in a remarkably prescient way: the company focused on proprietary technology that turned out to be too simple to compete in the digital age. Their designs were beautiful but not functional, and they were downright hard to work with. So the board of directors fired their enigmatic CEO, Steve Jobs, and replaced him with a string of dogmatic managers. The result was a company in ruins, technology in peril, stock with little value, and a business with no hope for the future.

  Then a funny thing happened. Steve Jobs returned to Apple and brought the company back to its original luster. In the process, he turned it into the biggest company in the world. In part, it was because Apple began to innovate again. But most of the success was a result of looking back to the future. Jobs returned Apple to its fundamentals: simple, elegant design, totalitarian control over the hardware and software, and relentless competition. This time around, the world was ready for Jobs’s vision, and Apple blossomed.

  Individual CEOs are often given far too much credit for their company’s success. But occasionally, individuals can make a real difference. In these cases, success comes as a result of a CEO’s passionate focus on a singular vision. It is often marked first with failure, a look into an abyss, before emerging ultimately more successful than before. It’s a breakpoint in its own right. That was the case with Apple and so too was it the case with Google. The question to ask is whether Mayer was a key component of Google’s success and whether she can drive Yahoo! forward by looking back to its future.

  I

  Yahoo! started life as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” which was almost as unsophisticated as it sounds. It was the brainchild of David Filo and Jerry Yang, two Stanford PhD students who built the guide to share their favorite websites with their fellow students. Early iterations of the site were merely David and Jerry’s lists of favorites, broken down into categories and subcategories. Real people, intelligently choosing the web’s best content to present to others.

  Despite its humble origins, Yahoo! positively exploded, going from zero to one million hits a day in less than a year. As its user base grew, so did demand for more and more content. What started out as a sparse white page with a single alphabetical list of categories grew into a dynamic, feature-rich one-stop shop. It was made for surfing and exploring. It wasn’t a search engine; in fact, it was meant to eliminate the need for a search engine. Yahoo! was a web portal, a kind of “welcome to the internet” home page, and in 1994 this was desperately needed. The average user had no idea what was available on this newfangled “internet”—she needed a tour guide, and Yahoo!’s portal filled that role. Search wasn’t a key component because no one had any idea what to search for.

  Imagine landing for the first time on a brand-new planet, about which you know nothing. You wouldn’t step out of your spaceship and start looking for tigers. You don’t even know if there are any tigers, or if that is what you should call them if they do exist. You would more likely want a tour guide to escort you to see the most interesting, worthwhile features of the planet. Especially when getting from one place to another would take several minutes of the limited time you had before someone inevitably picked up the telephone and inadvertently knocked you off the planet.

  As people became more familiar with the internet, the need for a tour guide decreased. People started using the internet to find specific information, and with that shift, the search box became a vital feature. Search engines popped up like gophers: Lycos, Excite, Altavis
ta, Magellan, Infoseek, DogPile. These search engines had a singular goal—index as many pages as possible. Early search engines organized the content of webpages by keywords, which were used to search on a massive scale. The more pages a search engine had indexed, the better. Google started out using this model as well. While founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still at Stanford, Google was already crawling almost fifty pages per second and was able to index sites even faster than that.

  In the 1990s, none of the search engines were particularly dominant. In fact, in 1996, when Netscape wanted to make a deal with a single search engine for its web portal, it ended up making a deal with five of them and using them in rotation. But by the year 2000, when Yahoo! sought a similar deal, Google was its clear choice. Remember, Yahoo! was never, and still isn’t, a search engine—it was created as a portal to the best of the internet, selected by people, not generated by machines. Yahoo! did initially have a search bar, but it only searched its own directory, not the full contents of the web.

  Most people think that search engines are about finding information—even the word “search” begs to be paired with “find.” And that’s what first-generation search engines did. They found as many pages as possible. However, in a world where several billion pages are added to the web every single day—some good, some great, but most completely worthless—the primary goal of search engines is to filter. Not to find, but to eliminate.

  Google, named after the massive number you get when you take 10 to the 100th power, made a fundamental shift in focus from quantity of pages indexed to quality of search results. The need for this became more apparent as the internet grew. Not coincidentally, that’s the same thing the brain does when it recalls or searches for information. It assigns appropriate value to what’s important and discards everything else.

  On the internet, how do you figure out what to filter and what to keep? How can a computer program tell what humans will find most valuable? Google shepherded in a new generation of search with a simple concept to solve these problems: the importance of a website is directly proportional to how many other websites link to it. And it is a matter not only of the number of links but also the quality of those links; the thinking being that the best websites should have many other reputable websites that link to them. This harks back to “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” where Jerry himself judged the quality of websites and put them on the list if he liked them. Only on Google, Jerry is replaced by the millions of webmasters who create each site and choose their links. The idea is that if a webmaster links to a page, he endorses it.

  There are millions of Jerrys, and Google essentially uncovers the recommendations of each one and aggregates the results to rank each website and determine whether a user will see that page first, fifteenth, or four hundredth. The result is that the sites with the best links are presented in the search results first. Of course, once a site gets to the top of Google (the goal of anyone with a website these days), it becomes even more popular and gets more links.

  Does that sound familiar? It should, because that is how the brain works: the best neurons, those with the richest connections, have the most links to other neurons around them. With Yahoo!, Jerry was the brain behind the search engine; with Google, the internet itself acts as the brain.

  In their own way, Google’s algorithms are mimicking the brain’s need to clear out the clutter and find the good stuff. Google’s method for assessing link relevance works precisely the way a simple neural network does. Links between neurons are weighted based on how relevant (or connected) they are to one another, and that weighting triggers or suppresses activity. Google uses a similar structure to rank or suppress websites through its search results.

  It’s no surprise that Google’s algorithms mimic the brain. Larry Page’s PhD advisor was Terry Winograd, well known not only as a professor of computer science at Stanford but also as a leading expert on brain science. Winograd’s books—including Understanding Natural Language, Language as a Cognitive Process, and Understanding Computers and Cognition—explore the possible bridges between human and computer communication. Page, in other words, was well versed in the brain by the time he founded Google. And if Page needed additional explanation of the bonds between cognition, language, and computers, he needed look no further than his own father, Carl Victor Page, who was a professor at Michigan State University and an expert in artificial intelligence.

  Even with its first-rate results and solid brain science roots, Google was relatively unknown until Yahoo! pegged it to be the official search engine alongside Jerry’s Guide and introduced Google to millions of users in 2000. You have to wonder if Yahoo! knew at the time that it had just given its most formidable competitor a formidable leg up.

  II

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Google started churning out product after product, many of them under the leadership of Marissa Mayer. And while the primary driver of Google’s traffic is search, it has become a portal in its own right, with news, videos, free email, maps, and the like. So even the world’s most superior search engine company has diversified to provide more of what users need from the internet. As Mayer explained while at Google, “what you want, when you want it. As opposed to everything you could ever want, even when you don’t.”

  At its heart, search has always been a conduit, a translator, between a human with a question and a machine that may or may not have the answer. This is a basic human need; it is what drove us to language formation and more complex forms of communication. Humans evolved complex tools for storing information within our own brains and across those of our peers. Communication enabled us to not only share information, but also retrieve it. Searching was one of the brain’s great innovations, allowing us to learn, adapt, and transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. Search was an early brain function to be sure—the newer brain regions responsible for things like consciousness utilize other tools. But search allowed us to expand our cognition beyond that of the animal kingdom. As we created new ways to expand that reach, we leveraged them with ever-increasing sophistication, whether it was cave painting, language, printing, or computing.

  The exponential growth of the internet brought about a similar challenge to that of the brain: how to categorize and recover all that information. The search engine has been the answer to that need for the past two decades, and Google has dominated that answer. Google simply has the best algorithms that produce a list of the websites most likely to be able to answer your question. Its algorithms best match those in our heads, so they provide a natural solution.

  Many companies have challenged Google’s dominance, but so far none has succeeded. The streets of Silicon Valley are littered with the corpses of the various search engines that have tried to beat Google at its game of producing great search results. Out of reverence for the dead (and having run one myself), I won’t mention these companies. But even Google is not indestructible.

  There are a few hot new search challengers that have some different ideas about search results. Blekko’s claim to fame is that it doesn’t have any advertising, a slap in the face to Google’s sponsored results. It also filters out any information provided by non-authoritative sources, cleverly dubbed “content farms.” Wolfram Alpha considers itself a “computational knowledge engine” that answers factual questions directly instead of providing a list of links. DuckDuckGo, in addition to featuring a cute cartoon duck in its ultraclean interface, uses information from sites like Wikipedia to augment traditional search results. So when I search for “Santa Monica,” it tells me that “Santa Monica is a city in western Los Angeles County, CA, US,” before giving me a list of links.

  Google’s answer to these competitors is Knowledge Graph, a side panel without embedded ads that shows up with facts and content about a topic instead of search results. These are serious threats—and Google treats them as such—despite the silly names. Could Bl
ekko, DuckDuckGo, or even Google 2.0 become the next Google? It’s unlikely. Google has largely won the search wars. Its kinks, unfortunately for these search startups, are not in search. Google’s problems are more long term, but also more fundamental. And these problems will ultimately lead to the demise of Google search and the rise of a host of new search technologies.

  III

  The real innovations in search will be more fundamental than filtering out spam or spitting out facts instead of links. The search revolution will consist of battles on three fronts. First, search engines will incorporate context to personalize results. Second, the human–machine interface will be perfected, and the search box will be eliminated. And finally, the demand for search will drastically decline as we turn to specialized apps and ultimately find the answers to our questions without search.

  Today, the major problem to be solved for Yahoo!, Google, and all the smaller, hungrier web companies is far beyond page rankings and light years beyond crawling millions of sites. It’s about giving users what they want, when they want it, where they want it—and no one knows this better than Marissa Mayer.

  Mayer held half a dozen titles at Google, but her last role, the one Yahoo! plucked her from, was VP of Local, Maps, and Location Services. Now, if you haven’t used Google Maps in the past few years, the only plausible explanation is that you haven’t left your house. This is an application that aspired to replace paper maps and grew into software that actually tells you where to go and where your friends are, in addition to how to get there with the least amount of traffic. No traditional paper map ever told you that Mike’s Café at the next exit has a five-star review for its grilled cheese and that if you don’t stop for gas now, the next station is 25 miles away. This technology is fundamentally changing our lives and businesses, and the exciting thing is that it’s in its infancy. In the next generation of search, context and personalization will reign supreme.