JERRY GOGUEN

When I first launched my company 1994, the Internet was quite small. We had one of the first 10,000 web sites, a dramatic increase from the first few hundred the year before. Search engines, web directories, and libraries were quite primitive, typically driven by human experts who effectively judged the value of content. Companies such as Excite and Yahoo began to create systems that could index the Web, but placed more value on the content of organizations that paid for "shelf space."... The most significant change came when Google began using the wisdom of the crowd to position the value of information. This was done by determining how many backlinks, or references from other sites, had been viewed and then shared via suggested links back to the referenced site. At the same time, Google allowed organizations to submit their site for inclusion. To effectively rank sites, Google used the number of views and a team of internal reviewers along with the public. While Google now employs..