3 ms·

I worked at the University of Washington, dept of Computer Science & Engineering, for the first half of the 1990s. I was there when the first webcrawler was cre

I worked at the University of Washington, dept of Computer Science & Engineering, for the first half of the 1990s. I was there when the first webcrawler was created (Brian Pinkerton). I knew a lot of graduate students there. I was the "webmaster" too. I feel fairly confident in saying that even though the facts of the MDDS grant that was helping to fund Page & Brin's graduate student research are clear, I do not believe that the involvement of the US military and intelligence services would have been particularly obvious and/or significant in their minds. Saying "They knew what they were doing and who they were doing it with all along" defies everything I knew about university CS graduate student research. I knew several UW graduate students (including one of my best friends) who were recipients of grant money that originated with the military/intelligence services; they were highly buffered from donor contacts and even donor requirements while working on their research. Most of them would joke to the effect of "our grant donor(s) would have a fit if they knew what we are actually working on", and would often have to struggle to explain how their research fit into the ostensible goals of the donor. I've also known many graduate students over the years for whom, especially in the early phases of their PhD research, it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom".

jqpabc123 3y ago
it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom". Sergey Brin dropped out of the doctorate program at Stanford in 1995 to spend more time working on his search engine. He and Page founded Goggle a few years later. Their and their company's close relationship with 3 letter agencies is well documented. Draw your own conclusions but to claim he didn't know what he was doing defies credibility IMO.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Their relationship is NOT well-documented during the founding stages of google. There is the MDDS grant and the analysis by some people that what the MDDS program was aiming for was almost precisely what pagerank+spider offered. My own analysis and that of others would note that MDDS was not in fact interested in a web search engine - they were interested in ways to identify individuals online. Google's services did indeed provide this, but not at the beginning - that had to wait for as much as 14 years later, and came about through google becoming the utterly dominant search engine. But that wasn't part of Brin's research, and I'm not sure that he & Page even recognized at the outset what "the set of things searched for by someone" would even mean. In fact, I see no evidence that the intelligence or law enforcement agencies saw that either, certainly not in 1995, when frankly the web was the domain of a bunch of tech first-adopters and appeared quite unlikely to become the platform it was by, say, 2012. Very, very few people saw the potential of the web in 1995, and the idea that intelligence agencies had people far out ahead of CS (and physics!) departments is laughable to me. I was also the #2 employee at amzn, and the amount of crap I read where people speculate about what was being said, thought and done at that company during its earliest days is laughable. I have no doubt in my mind that early google is similarly serendipitous: a hacker/grad student project, partially funded by MDDS, that mushroomed into initially an insanely powerful tool for web users and because of this then became a system of intense interest to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

jqpabc123 3y ago

it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom". Sergey Brin dropped out of the doctorate program at Stanford in 1995 to spend more time working on his search engine. He and Page founded Goggle a few years later. Their and their company's close relationship with 3 letter agencies is well documented. Draw your own conclusions but to claim he didn't know what he was doing defies credibility IMO.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Their relationship is NOT well-documented during the founding stages of google. There is the MDDS grant and the analysis by some people that what the MDDS program was aiming for was almost precisely what pagerank+spider offered. My own analysis and that of others would note that MDDS was not in fact interested in a web search engine - they were interested in ways to identify individuals online. Google's services did indeed provide this, but not at the beginning - that had to wait for as much as 14 years later, and came about through google becoming the utterly dominant search engine. But that wasn't part of Brin's research, and I'm not sure that he & Page even recognized at the outset what "the set of things searched for by someone" would even mean. In fact, I see no evidence that the intelligence or law enforcement agencies saw that either, certainly not in 1995, when frankly the web was the domain of a bunch of tech first-adopters and appeared quite unlikely to become the platform it was by, say, 2012. Very, very few people saw the potential of the web in 1995, and the idea that intelligence agencies had people far out ahead of CS (and physics!) departments is laughable to me. I was also the #2 employee at amzn, and the amount of crap I read where people speculate about what was being said, thought and done at that company during its earliest days is laughable. I have no doubt in my mind that early google is similarly serendipitous: a hacker/grad student project, partially funded by MDDS, that mushroomed into initially an insanely powerful tool for web users and because of this then became a system of intense interest to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.