By: Itziar Campos
Mindshare

"The mix of proportions are known by me,
and I know the calculated weights,
I know how it will appear sunken and how to rise it.
According to the case, if one enters or leaves,
I know how to place the body in the right place."
(Excerpt from Egyptian stelae, Museum of the Louvre)

In ancient Egypt, words had immense magical power. According to legend, the Demiurge Autum (the engine of the world) and its emanation, named RA, only had to pronounce the name of an element to bring it to life. Essentially, words made things real, which is probably why Ra's name was written using the hieroglyphic signs of a mouth (symbolizing the verb) and an arm under it (referring to the action).

Beyond being magical, writing also required special technical skills in ancient Egypt, and this led to the creation of powerful classes in Egyptian society that included priests, scribes and artists.

These days, words may not be magical, but they surely are important in what some have called the "Society of Information." Word power flexes its muscle in advertising as we shape a message to reach an audience. It's also powerful in the online world as tons of information is created and flows through multiple channels. The flow can easily be seen as an overwhelming flood. So how do we process so much information? How do we structure and have it serve our interests?

Once again, the magic of words comes into play. In autumn 1995, Larry Page (an electrical engineer with experience in web design) and Sergey Brin (an expert in data processing with a degree in computer and mathematical science) began to create an algorithm for data search that became the heart of how Google—the world's most popular search engine—operates.

Today Google has become the world's most valuable brand, ahead of the flagship Microsoft, General Electric, Coca Cola...and it responds to over 200 million queries per day.

Like the ancient Egyptians, Google uses, through its relevance index, the power of words to sort, organize, and categorize the vast amount of information that exists in cyberspace. Larry Page himself explains this in the presentation: 'PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web.' The Page Rank is one of the determining factors in Google's index and is important to measure the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. Each link from site A to a page on site B adds to site B's Page Rank.

As in ancient civilizations, words and technical skills still grant great power to anyone who uses them. A great power that Google and its users have spread to other areas: technology, advertising, telecommunications, geo-positioning...

For more on the 'PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web' click here:

www.ilpubs.stanford.edu

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