Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class
Educational Technology Services, UC Berkeley
39 min 43 sec - Oct 3, 2005

These are my notes:

- Take fairly simple ideas and make them scale
- PageRank: playing around with studying the links on the web
- Problem: very large graph
- Not all web pages are created equal; some are less important
- Berkeley
- Search for Kings
- We were able to scale
- Technology is an inherent democratizer
- Evolution of algorithms: can scale anything you can think of up
- Tools that are equal power

Here are my notes and thoughts on some answers given by Sergey:

- Competition doesn’t keep us up at night (Microsoft)
- Incredible opportunity; how will Google use it?
- Example: ad network
- High quality sites: helps good sites stay online
- Sometimes annoyed by them
- Like to THINK they are better than flashy ads
- Income stream for people developing great content
- By accident, created search that’s better in important ways that other search engines ignored
- (Yahoo licensed Google search engine)
- We thought we’d give it a try. Relatively little downside to trying!
- Advisor: go, try it out, and come back for Ph.D program.
- Computers need to do the tagging and semantics. Man and machine; people can’t do it
- Innovative algorithms can extract this knowledge
- Don’t have people enter the data carefully
- CJK languages: technical barrier
- Trade, policy questions that haven’t played out yet!
- Can’t predict what will happen in China in the future!
- Participation in China is good: help people have access to more information and communication services (and good for business, too)
- Germany, US: comply with laws they don’t agree with
- Spend more time researching and writing! Not good use of human effort to organize and tag (classify)
- Censorship in China - not censoring
- NASA announcements; collaborate with other research institutions
- It’s important to do what you love
- Science and math, computer science
- Got computers as a gift; dad’s a mathematician

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