Larry Page told the conference today that his invention (PageRank, the thing that drives Google) holds a lesson for science funders…
He started his whole project by accident. He decided to map out the links of the internet, thinking it would take “about a week”, and a few years later had a pretty nice dataset. And, oh, by the way, maybe it would be useful for searching too. “It was completely random – it’s a great example of pure research and why we want to do it.”
“When you have basic technologies, you find interesting things to do with them. If you’re lucky it turns into something big.” Funding agencies take note.
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