Inside Larry and Sergey's Brian

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I finished reading the book "Inside Larry and Sergey's Brian" by Brandt today. Like the book cover mentioned, "the book is about Larry Page and Sergey Brin."




I in general like the book because it is informative for me this time. I need read more about adword and adsense and what happened in other search engines. Brandt emphasized a lot about how the both famous guys dominate now because they are determined and they are idealists. This might be true. As a computing professional, I think the story of Google is a good case study about computational thinking, i.e., abstraction and automating. The pagerank algorithm, adword, and adsense are simple and elegant ideas. They are not complicated artifact. But they effectively automate the tasks they are supposed to perform. And the computing infrastructure, which supports the search algorithms, the advertising models, and the "cloud computing" in google, is effective, complicated, and requires to delicate abstraction of the problems Google is solving.

I am impressed by the book since it triggers thoughts I should continue to dig more.

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