22 Examples of Major Technology Advances That Stem From Federal Research Support (e.g. Google search [View all]

[Bill USA]

algorithm)...

Federally Supported Innovations: 22 Examples of Major Technology Advances That Stem From Federal Research Support

Cases of U.S. Technology Innovation That Stem from Federal Funding...

Information Technology

Google Search Engine
GPS
Supercomputers
Artificial Intelligence and Speech Recognition

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Pg 10)

CASES OF U.S. TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION THAT STEM FROM FEDERAL FUNDING

Information Technology

Google Search Engine

Two graduate students working on the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project,
supported with $4.5 million in grants from NSF, came up with an idea for a new
algorithm. PageRank, the algorithm, was the basis for a search engine they called
BackRub. After first testing BackRub on equipment partially paid for by NSF, the
two students sought private financing and founded the now ubiquitous company
Google.


Two graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, began work on
an Internet search engine dubbed BackRub in 1996, as part of their academic research.38
Two years later, after an infusion of $100,000 in venture capital funds, they renamed their
search engine Google and incorporated the company of the same name.39 Today Google is
a Fortune 100 company and the dominant force in internet search engines. As of January
23, 2014, Google’s market value stood at $387 billion.40

The National Science Foundation’s Digital Library Initiative supported Page and Brin’s
research. The $4.5 million Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project—supported by
NASA, DARPA, and several industrial partners, in addition to NSF—looked to reimagine
how information would be collected and made available as digital repositories replaced
traditional collections of books. Page and Erin created a new algorithm called PageRank to
search through information posted to the internet.41 There were other internet search
engines available, but the Stanford researchers thought they could do better. PageRank
computed how valuable a page was likely to be by considering how many other webpages
cited it, and the importance of each of those linking pages. PageRank rank helped BackRub
return results that were usually more relevant to the searchers> interests.42 Soon BackRub
transitioned from the academic world to the commercial world as Google, a name Page and
Erin chose to indicate their confidence that they could search the entire World Wide Web
(“Googol” is the very large number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeroes).

The company has branched out into advertising, social networking, email hosting, and
operating systems for the mobile device market, while continuing to improve upon its core
information search and retrieval, which still incorporates a version of PageRank. Google’s
search engine has also created a marketing industry based around search engine
optimization, which aims to raise a webpage’s ranking so it appears near the beginning of
related searches.   Meanwhile federal agencies continue to support research on computer
and information science and are actively exploring strategies for improving public access to
quality information on the web.
(more)