> Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two nerds who left Stanford before getting their master’s degrees to found Google, were at the start endearing. > If you run your

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two nerds who left Stanford before getting their master’s degrees to found Google, were at the start endearing. > If you run your eyes down this list, you’ll see that Google and YouTube together, which are both owned by Alphabet, have twice the traffic of the next eighteen sites combined—over 200 billion visits per month for Google and YouTube. It's interesting how the founding mythos gets compressed by time to omit key details: https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... This is also why the whole debate about Alphabet/Google profiling and spying on users is just an incidental detail and at best a distraction from the real mechanism, which is to incentivize everyone making as many network connections as possible all the time. The network itself is what does the analysis, like Room 641A and friends. It's all about that metadata. Contents don't really matter. When the product people get things like “message-send causes notification on recipient's phone” to be realtime-enough, even a single type of metadata like “this IP address made a network connection at this time” will be enough to eventually filter a person's complete social network out of a large enough timespan of metadata collection.