Rebirth of the Wild Age

"Come on, come on, let's meet on nine or eight. Meet under the silver moonlight, meet in the warm affection..."

Song Weiyang sat in front of the computer in his room, and could hear singing from a house next door.

As dvds are constantly robbing the market and the competition among vcd manufacturers is intensifying, the price of vcd machines is getting cheaper and cheaper. No, some workers in Xianjiu Group can afford it, and then set up two pillar-like speakers, and when the song is played at home, the whole community can hear it.

It is estimated that someone was disturbed by the noise, so they simply used fire to fight fire, turned it up louder, and even used a subwoofer: "I always want to confess to you, how heroic I feel. I always want to tell you how much I love life ..."

The struggle between the two heroes soon turned into a confrontation between the three kingdoms: "Hey, the happy gongs and drums beat out the festivities every year, and the beautiful dances brought joy every day..."

Song Weiyang had no choice but to get up and close the glass window. If he continued to listen like this, he would almost have a nervous breakdown.

It has to be said that China's piracy industry is very developed, and the work efficiency is extremely high. It's not even the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, and the popular song of this year's Spring Festival Gala has been made into a vcd record, and it's even sold in a small city like Rongping - the original record hasn't been released yet!

Song Weiyang really wants to do a market survey at this time, to study the production and sales channels of pirated VCD records, maybe he can use it as a graduation thesis.

For the Spring Festival Gala on Lunar New Year's Eve, those who do pirates must record the songs that night, and then convert them into VCD format overnight. Then it was mass-produced in the factory, and then shipped to all directions, distributed by dealers layer by layer, and finally appeared on the streets of large, medium and small cities.

The pirates actually completed these steps within three or four days, which can be called a major business miracle in the world!

The phone rang suddenly, Ding Ming called.

"I paid New Year's greetings on the first day of the lunar new year, and New Year's greetings on the fourth day?" Song Weiyang laughed.

Ding Mingdao: "Old Song, I received an email yesterday from the United States. Someone is promoting a search engine, and its core calculation method is called pagerank. I communicated with the company's search engine research and development team. The description is exactly what we need. So, after the eighth day of the lunar new year, I will lead a team to the United States for investigation.”

"Are you sure it's pagerank?" Song Weiyang was a little confused. That's Google's core technology, and Google's success is based on that.

Ding Ming said: "It is indeed called pagerank. I once posted a post on a technology forum in the United States, saying that I wanted to recruit American search engine experts. I also left my company email address. I guess someone saw the post and came to sell technology."

Song Weiyang asked: "Have you contacted the other party?"

Ding Ming said: "I sent an email, but the other party hasn't replied yet."

Song Weiyang said: "Continue to keep in touch, get the visa done, and prepare to go to the United States."

"Okay, I'll call you when I have news." Ding Ming said.

Song Weiyang thought: Is this the butterfly effect? If the founder of Google sells the core technology, can Google still grow bigger? In other words, will the Google company still be established?

In fact, it's really not a butterfly effect.

The two founders of Google developed the search engine at the end of 1997, but the name is not Google, but backrub (the predecessor of Google).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are real bulls. The research and development team under Ding Ming, with seven or eight people working for more than half a year, finally came up with the "smart search engine", which is not very easy to use. There are only two people in the family, and they used their spare time to make a backrub search engine in less than three months, and also developed an incomplete version of the pagerank algorithm.

After making a search engine and developing the pagerank algorithm, the first reaction of the two was not to start a company, but to license the technology. Since no company was willing to cooperate, they decided to sell it outright, and the asking price was only $1.6 million.

Still no one is willing to buy it!

Then I had to start my own company, and then there was Google.

Scott Hassan, the third employee of Google in the future, is a friend of Larry and Sergey at this time. He is helping them sell search engines, and he also found George, the CEO of Excite (one of the mainstream search engines in the United States) Bell.

George Bell used his own search engine to search for the keyword "internet", and found a bunch of messy results. Then use backrub (the future Google) to search and find a bunch of very reasonable content, which shows that Google is still more usable.

But George Bell was not happy, saying: "We don't want your search engine, we don't want people to find what they want easily, because we want people to stay on our website."

Yes, the Google search engine is too good to use, so we are determined not to use it!

It may sound ridiculous, but this is the mainstream business Internet concept in 1997: portals are the foundation, and only with traffic can you make money, and you can get financing for listing and refinancing. If netizens can easily search for content, what are they using portals for?

The larger the portal, the more resistant it is to excellent search engines, because they are afraid that their users will run away.

Even the search engine companies with the best word-of-mouth and the top three usage rates in the United States at this time will fully transform into portal websites in 1998, and will no longer invest in additional research and development of search engines. The result of this incident was that Li Yanhong resigned in anger and returned to China to found Baidu.

"Honey, are you out?" Chen Tao called and asked.

"I've already gone downstairs." Song Weiyang picked up his coat and went out.

He will drive to pick up Chen Tao, have lunch together, and go to the movies in the afternoon.

On the way, Ding Ming called again: "The United States replied to the email. He said that his name is Scott Hassan, a programmer, and the backrub search engine was developed by two of his friends. They want If it is authorized to Sohu, the annual licensing fee is 100,000 US dollars. If it is exclusively licensed, it is 500,000 US dollars per year, and the contract is signed once a year."

Song Weiyang said: "Ask them if they sell it, and the pagerank algorithm must be won."

"Wait a minute, I asked for his ICQ, and I'm communicating online." Ding Ming said.

Two minutes later, Ding Ming said again: "The other party said that they can sell the pagerank algorithm, and the asking price is 3 million US dollars."

"Buy it!" Song Weiyang excitedly said.

"The company doesn't have that much money." Ding Ming said.

"I'll pay for it!" Song Weiyang said.

Ding Ming said, "I'll ask again."

More than ten minutes later, Chen Tao had already boarded the car. Ding Ming called and said, "I asked him about the patent situation, and the pagerank algorithm has no patent. The man spoke vaguely, as if there was something wrong, it couldn't be Did you steal someone else's technology?"

Song Weiyang really didn't know the inside story, but he knew that Google's core technology was definitely not stolen, so he ordered: "Go to the United States as soon as possible, and you must buy the technology."

"Okay, I'll apply for a visa tomorrow." Ding Ming's inner thought was to check the situation first.

If it weren't for the foresight of the traveler, ghosts would buy the pagerank algorithm, and there is still no final and perfect version. Due to the partial overlap with Li Yanhong's patent, this thing was not approved by the US Patent Office until three years later.

If Song Weiyang bought the algorithm, it is estimated that pagerank would never be recognized by the US Patent Office.

But that's enough.

The question is, will Google still exist?