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2002
The technology
behind Google's great results
This was the headline at the top of a Google
search engine page on April first along
with a picture of rows of pigeons sitting
in front of computers. The new Google page
announced that, "The heart of Google's
search technology is PigeonRank™, a
system for ranking web pages developed by
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
at Stanford University."
The announcement continued, "Building
upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner,
Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon
clusters (PCs) could be used to compute
the relative value of web pages faster than
human editors or machine-based algorithms.
And while Google has dozens of engineers
working to improve every aspect of our service
on a daily basis, PigeonRank continues to
provide the basis for all of our web search
tools."
The article stated that because of the
domestic pigeon, Columba livia's ability
to be trained Google has been able to outpace
the other search engines in their relevancy
ranking tasks. The special characteristic
of this pigeon is it ability to differentiate
between minute details in web sites and
sort them accordingly. Because of the PigeonRank™
system, Google is "superior to traditional
search engines, which typically rely on
birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving
waterfowl to do their relevance rankings."
The pages, which get the most pigeon pecks,
get ranked at the top of the keyword category
for a particular search. B. F. Skinner who
is known as the "Father of Behavioral
Modification" in psychological circles,
and an avid pigeon person, is given credit
for his experiments with pigeons as breaking
the ground for PigeonRank™ technology.
The pigeons do not work in computer rooms,
but rather "data coops" where
they peck out search rankings for thousands
of web sites and pigeon poop is recycled
into monitor pixels for display on the Google
homepage.
For the full text of this story check out
the Google link at: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
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