If you’ve found your way to TvB, may the gods bless and sustain you! I’m not blogging here (much) these days, but if you’re curious about my latest work, please teleport to Magellan TV. It’s a wondrous science and history video streaming service, which I’m proud to be part of.
One of my first pieces was on the secret history of search engines, which as I learned stretches back thousands of years. I’ve written about some of the techy aspects of ranking algorithms on my Medium account. In my research for this Magellan article, I was shocked to discover that the Googly idea of indexing massive amounts of data was born about the time of … the Library of Alexandria (circa 4th century BC).
In the article, you’ll learn about the ancient world’s great data scientist, Callamachus of Cyrene — the Larry Page of his day. Then there’s a fascinating history that carries this indexing concept forward to the present with appearances from Aristotle, the Dewey Decimal System. and HG Wells. And for the wonks out there, Page and Brin got the idea of scanning and indexing university library books directly from our greatest sci-fi writer ever, Mr. Wells and his World Brain project.