Me

The technology behind Google's great results

As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google

manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search

technology is PigeonRankÐ'™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and

Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters

(PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based

algorithms. And while Google has dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of our service on a

daily basis, PigeonRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

Why Google's patented PigeonRankÐ'™ works so well

PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and

its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily

distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant

web sites from among thousands of similar pages.

By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior

to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to

do their relevance rankings.

When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where

monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is

observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel

bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For

each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most

pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results

displayed in pecking order.

Integrity

Google's pigeon-driven methods make tampering with our results extremely difficult. While some

unscrupulous websites have tried to boost their ranking by including images on their pages of bread crumbs,

bird seed and parrots posing seductively in resplendent plumage, Google's PigeonRank technology cannot be

deceived by these techniques. A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality

websites with information relevant to your search.

Data

PigeonRank Frequently Asked Questions

How was PigeonRank developed?

The ease of training pigeons was documented early in the annals of science and fully explored by

noted psychologist B.F. Skinner, who demonstrated that with only minor incentives, pigeons could be

trained to execute complex tasks such as playing ping pong, piloting bombs or revising the

Abatements, Credits and Refunds section of the national tax code.

Brin and Page were the first to recognize that this adaptability could be harnessed through massively

parallel pecking to solve complex problems, such as ordering large datasets or ordering pizza for

large groups of engineers. Page and Brin experimented with numerous avian motivators before

settling on a combination of linseed and flax (lin/ax) that not only offered superior performance, but

could be gathered at no cost from nearby open space preserves. This open space lin/ax powers

Google's operations to this day, and a visit to the data coop reveals pigeons happily pecking away at

lin/ax kernels and seeds.

What are the challenges of operating so many pigeon clusters (PCs)?