Links are the life blood of the Internet; hey allow you to travel to and fro with a simple click of your mouse.
The history behind links is a fascinating one.
On a very simple level, the power of links on the Web can be found in the answer to this question: "What was the name of the popular search engine before it was called Google?" Before you find out, let me say that the answer is related to the history of links.
How so? Well, according to the book "Google Story" by David Vise, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to come up with a revolutionary search engine.
What they discovered was that the Web was all about links.
That is, Page had this theory that if you counted the number of links a particular website had pointing back to it, you could get a good idea of its popularity.
Popularity is one form of measuring "relevancy.
" Counting the number of links that point back to your site, you could measure your site's popularity.
Links are a form of citation.
Both Page and Brin grew up with parents who valued scientific research and academic journals and publications that had their own form of citations.
"It turns out, people who win the Nobel Prize have citations from 10,000 different papers," Page says.
Citations in the academic world mean your work is important because it is worth being cited.
Likewise, the more often a website is cited with a link pointing back to it, the higher score Google gives it.
Sites with the most "back links" get the highest rankings.
However, not all back links are created equal.
The search engine founders discovered that greater weight should be given to links coming from so-called "important sites.
" Which ones are the important sites? The ones with the most links pointing back to them.
Therefore, the number of links pointing to a site is important.
If those links are coming from important sites that also have a lot of links pointing to them, that adds value.
Now, we come to the answer to the question, "What was the name of the popular search engine before it was called Google?" The primitive, pre-Google search engine was called "Back Rub.
" Why? Because "it dealt with the incoming - or 'back' - links to Web pages.
" To quote radio personality Paul Harvey, "Now you know the rest of the story.
"
The history behind links is a fascinating one.
On a very simple level, the power of links on the Web can be found in the answer to this question: "What was the name of the popular search engine before it was called Google?" Before you find out, let me say that the answer is related to the history of links.
How so? Well, according to the book "Google Story" by David Vise, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to come up with a revolutionary search engine.
What they discovered was that the Web was all about links.
That is, Page had this theory that if you counted the number of links a particular website had pointing back to it, you could get a good idea of its popularity.
Popularity is one form of measuring "relevancy.
" Counting the number of links that point back to your site, you could measure your site's popularity.
Links are a form of citation.
Both Page and Brin grew up with parents who valued scientific research and academic journals and publications that had their own form of citations.
"It turns out, people who win the Nobel Prize have citations from 10,000 different papers," Page says.
Citations in the academic world mean your work is important because it is worth being cited.
Likewise, the more often a website is cited with a link pointing back to it, the higher score Google gives it.
Sites with the most "back links" get the highest rankings.
However, not all back links are created equal.
The search engine founders discovered that greater weight should be given to links coming from so-called "important sites.
" Which ones are the important sites? The ones with the most links pointing back to them.
Therefore, the number of links pointing to a site is important.
If those links are coming from important sites that also have a lot of links pointing to them, that adds value.
Now, we come to the answer to the question, "What was the name of the popular search engine before it was called Google?" The primitive, pre-Google search engine was called "Back Rub.
" Why? Because "it dealt with the incoming - or 'back' - links to Web pages.
" To quote radio personality Paul Harvey, "Now you know the rest of the story.
"
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