Activist Technical Geek and Sensitive Nature-Lover - Research Paper Example

December 19, Activist Technical Geek and Sensitive Nature-Lover: Two Sides of Sergey Brin There is a lot that can be said about Sergey Brin. He is Russian, young (born in 1973), wealthy (16.7 billion dollars), a minority member (Russian Jew), an immigrant (came to the US at age six), educated (Stanford University), resourceful (started his search engine in a garage, with his best friend), a family man (wife and child), accomplished (co-founded Google), and an activist (threw pebbles at a police car when encountering Soviet oppression; targeted universal access to information, with Google) (Wikipedia).

He is brilliant, obviously, in organizing the Web through Google. He is highly accomplished, in that he placed all available information at everyone’s fingertips, equally, a very democratic approach to social change. This paper will focus on two extreme aspects of who Sergey is: his technical and universal organization of Google and his personal use of Google to communicate what is personally important to anyone interested. In order to establish Google, he faced significant problems.

The first was the rapid escalation of knowledge available, which meant that the search engines of just three years ago were grossly inadequate. He needed to index hundreds of millions of web pages and arrange for the answering tens of millions of queries each day (Brin and Page). To address this challenge, he had to scale Google to respond to a previously unprecedented amount of data (Brin and Page). Secondly, no one had described the design of a search engine, in an academic way before (Brin and Page), so, unlike other disciplines, the knowledge was not shared by a scholarly community.

That makes it more difficult to advance knowledge because there is limited opportunity for dialogue. To address the second problem, he wrote and published a very careful academic description, in great detail (Brin and Page), so that the knowledge could be shared and later advanced. Third, he needed to decide how to handle the additional information in hypertext and how to prioritize it, since anyone can write anything and put it on the web (Brin and Page). There needed to be a way to sort out the opinions of the uninformed from the research of top scholars.

Also, there should be a way to respond differently to people looking for articles and people looking for pictures. To address the third problem, Google contained priority and category levels. Google Scholar, for example brings up academic articles and citations, while Google Images brings up pictures and cartoons, and Wikipedia falls under a general web search category, etc. Sergey Brin is deeply connected to Google. It is not simply something he invented and then moved on from, to do something different.

He uses Google to present what he most treasures in his free time. He loves nature photography and he is an excellent photographer. He posted the most beautiful photos, each one presenting an intimate encounter with nature. Here are some examples of what I mean (Brin, Sergey Brin): From these photos, and the others he has posted, it is clear that Sergey Brin is deeply connected to nature. There are photos of animals, close-up, photos of desert and mountain landscapes, aerial photos of salt flats, a picture of an eclipse, the inside tunnels of stone pyramids, fish and glistening sponge in the sea, a large range of experiences that Sergey wanted to share with the world.

Therefore, I see that this man is not just a technical geek but is a sensitive, fully engaged person. I think this is key to understanding him. Yes, his brilliance and vision resulted in Google, but he was more than that. He set an example of how Google can create community and connect people in their experience of each other. He is a very committed person and this is reflected in his professional life and in his personal life.Works CitedBrin, Sergey and Lawrence Page. "The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." 2006. Bibliography Repository.

19 December 2011 .Brin, Sergey. "Sergey Brin." 15 December 2011. Google +. 19 December 2011 .Wikipedia. "Sergey Brin." 2011. Wikipedia. 19 December 2011 .