Aravind Srinivas

This is sort of a cat and mouse thing. You cannot proactively foresee every single issue. Some of it has to be reactive. And this is also how Google has dealt with all this. Not all of it was foreseen. And that's why it's very interesting.

First of all, the number one thing I took away which not a lot of people talk about this, is they didn't compete with the other search engines by doing the same thing. They flipped it, like they said, hey, everyone's just focusing on text-based similarity, traditional information extraction and information retrieval, which was not working that great. What if we instead ignore the text?

First of all, the number one thing I took away which not a lot of people talk about this, is they didn't compete with the other search engines by doing the same thing. They flipped it, like they said, hey, everyone's just focusing on text-based similarity, traditional information extraction and information retrieval, which was not working that great. What if we instead ignore the text?

First of all, the number one thing I took away which not a lot of people talk about this, is they didn't compete with the other search engines by doing the same thing. They flipped it, like they said, hey, everyone's just focusing on text-based similarity, traditional information extraction and information retrieval, which was not working that great. What if we instead ignore the text?

We use the text at a basic level, but we actually look at the link structure and try to extract ranking signal from that instead. I think that was a key insight.

We use the text at a basic level, but we actually look at the link structure and try to extract ranking signal from that instead. I think that was a key insight.

We use the text at a basic level, but we actually look at the link structure and try to extract ranking signal from that instead. I think that was a key insight.

Exactly. And the fact, I mean, Sergey's magic came like he just reduced it to power iteration, right? And Larry's idea was like the link structure has some valuable signal. So... After that, they hired a lot of great engineers who came and built more ranking signals from traditional information extraction that made PageRank less important.

Exactly. And the fact, I mean, Sergey's magic came like he just reduced it to power iteration, right? And Larry's idea was like the link structure has some valuable signal. So... After that, they hired a lot of great engineers who came and built more ranking signals from traditional information extraction that made PageRank less important.

Exactly. And the fact, I mean, Sergey's magic came like he just reduced it to power iteration, right? And Larry's idea was like the link structure has some valuable signal. So... After that, they hired a lot of great engineers who came and built more ranking signals from traditional information extraction that made PageRank less important.

But the way they got their differentiation from other search engines at the time was through a different ranking signal. And the fact that it was inspired from academic citation graphs, which coincidentally was also the inspiration for us in perplexity. Citations, you know, you're an academic, you've written papers. We all have Google scholars.

But the way they got their differentiation from other search engines at the time was through a different ranking signal. And the fact that it was inspired from academic citation graphs, which coincidentally was also the inspiration for us in perplexity. Citations, you know, you're an academic, you've written papers. We all have Google scholars.

But the way they got their differentiation from other search engines at the time was through a different ranking signal. And the fact that it was inspired from academic citation graphs, which coincidentally was also the inspiration for us in perplexity. Citations, you know, you're an academic, you've written papers. We all have Google scholars.

We all like at least, you know, first few papers we wrote, we'd go and look at Google scholar every single day and see if the citations are increasing. There was some dopamine hit from that, right? So papers that got highly cited was like usually a good thing, good signal. And in Perplexity, that's the same thing too.

We all like at least, you know, first few papers we wrote, we'd go and look at Google scholar every single day and see if the citations are increasing. There was some dopamine hit from that, right? So papers that got highly cited was like usually a good thing, good signal. And in Perplexity, that's the same thing too.

We all like at least, you know, first few papers we wrote, we'd go and look at Google scholar every single day and see if the citations are increasing. There was some dopamine hit from that, right? So papers that got highly cited was like usually a good thing, good signal. And in Perplexity, that's the same thing too.

We said the citation thing is pretty cool and domains that get cited a lot, there's some ranking signal there and that can be used to build a new kind of ranking model for the internet. And that is different from the click-based ranking model that Google is building. So I think that's... why I admire those guys.

We said the citation thing is pretty cool and domains that get cited a lot, there's some ranking signal there and that can be used to build a new kind of ranking model for the internet. And that is different from the click-based ranking model that Google is building. So I think that's... why I admire those guys.

We said the citation thing is pretty cool and domains that get cited a lot, there's some ranking signal there and that can be used to build a new kind of ranking model for the internet. And that is different from the click-based ranking model that Google is building. So I think that's... why I admire those guys.

They had like deep academic grounding, very different from the other founders who are more like undergraduate dropouts trying to do a company. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, they all fit in that sort of mold. Larry and Sergey were the ones who were like Stanford PhDs trying to like have those academic roots and yet trying to build a product that people use.